













































































































































THE FATE OF THE FAMILY 



THE EHTE OE 
THE EHM1LT 

IN THE MODERN WORLD 

BY 

ARTHUR e! HOLT 

Professor of Social Ethics , 

Chicago Theological Seminary 



Willett, Clark 0 s Company 

CHICAGO NEW YORK 

1936 




Copyright 1936 by 
WILLETT, CLARK & COMPANY 




Manufactured in The U. S. A. by The Plimpton Press 
Norwood, Mass.-LaPorte, Ind. 


APR 11 l 838 

©ci A 


115818 




TO MY FAMILY 



FOREWORD 


THESE CHAPTERS were originally presented as 
part of the radio extension program of the University 
of Chicago. The consequent appreciation shown by 
husbands and wives and fathers and mothers encour¬ 
aged the belief that they were perhaps helpful enough 
to justify their commitment to print. The fact that 
they were given as lectures accounts for much that is 
informal and colloquial in their present style. 

I wish to acknowledge a debt of obligation to both 
the Reverend Anton T. Boisen, lecturer and research 
associate in the psychology of religion at the Chicago 
Theological Seminary, and to Mrs. Anna May Hornsby 
for valuable suggestions and the use of case work 
material. 















































































































































































































































































































































































CONTENTS 


Christianity and Family Life i 

part ONE 

TYPES OF FAMILIES 

I. Oriental Marriage: the Totalitarian 

Race 9 

II. Conventional European Marriage: the 

Totalitarian Class 20 

III. Democracy and the Romantic Marriage 28 

PART TWO 

THE MENACE OF INDIVIDUALISM 

IV. The Betrayal of the Family 43 

V. The Self-Centered Mind 50 

VI. Urban and Rural Atomism 62 

VII. The Surrender of Romance 71 

PART THREE 

IMPROVING THE DEMOCRATIC 
FAMILY 

VIII. The Problem Facing the Romantic 

Marriage 81 

ix 


X 


Contents 


IX. Inside the Family Circle 86 

X. Socializing the Family 93 

XI. Making the Nation Safe for the Fam¬ 

ily no 

XII. When the Family Must Fight for its 

Rights 121 

PART FOUR 

THE CHURCH AND THE FAMILY 

XIII. When People Meet Crises 131 

XIV. Societies of Interpretation 137 

XV. Religion as a Resource for Mental 

Health 148 

XVI. When Religions Behave Badly 155 

XVII. When Religions Behave Well 165 

XVIII. Whom Hath God Joined? 177 

XIX. Summary 182 


THE FATE OF THE FAMILY 





















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CHRISTIANITY AND FAMILY LIFE 


MOST OF US have at some time attended a wedding 
at a church when two young people, before an assem¬ 
bly of friends and relatives, came down the aisle with 
their attendants and plighted their troth as the minister 
read to them the great ritual of the church. We have 
heard him use the words: 

Dearly beloved brethren, we are gathered to¬ 
gether here in the sight of God and in the face of 
this company to join together this man and this 
woman in holy matrimony. 

We have heard him ask the question: 

John, wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded 
wife to live together after God’s ordinance in the 
holy estate of matrimony ? 

And: 

Mary, wilt thou have this man to thy wedded 
husband to live together after God’s ordinance in 
the holy estate of matrimony ? 

And at the end he has pronounced those ominous 
words: 

Those whom God hath joined together let no 
man put asunder. 


2 


The Fate of the Family 


The solemnity of the great ritual, the music, the con¬ 
gratulations of friends, the exalted joy, have made the 
whole occasion significant in our eyes. Sometimes we 
have even thought that the greatest service which the 
church renders in the community lies in making im¬ 
pressive and giving meaning to this great occasion. 

We have seen these two young people, with the good 
will of interested friends, establish their home in the 
community. To that home the minister has gone in 
what we have termed “ pastoral calling.” These two 
people have attended church. Later we have seen them 
come down the aisle with their first born and pledge 
themselves to rear the child in the nurture and admoni¬ 
tion of the Lord. We have seen the child join some of 
the numerous groups which are always present in the 
well-organized church. 

In earlier days there was the family pew — still used 
in some churches — where families regularly took their 
places and joined in divine worship. The youth who 
departed from these families found natural association 
in the church fellowships, and they in turn were mar¬ 
ried, and another cycle began. One by one, as the 
threescore years and ten were completed, those who sat 
in the family pews were borne away to the quiet spot 
on the hill where the larger fellowship of the saints will 
always be. In the mind of the church they joined the 
Church Eternal. 

All of us, as we meditated on the cycle, have felt 
that there is an intimate relationship between the in¬ 
stitution we call the church and the institution we call 


Christianity and Family Life 3 

the family. This relationship is not peculiar to any one 
faith. In all its essentials it is true of Judaism, Catholi¬ 
cism and Protestantism. There seems to be something 
universal in the relationship. 

Yet, although we have been impressed by the inti¬ 
mate relationships between church and family and have 
hoped that the bonds so sacredly sealed would be per¬ 
manent, we have often seen the families which “ God 
hath joined together ” torn asunder and devastated by 
great social scourges such as intemperance, prostitution, 
gambling and ignorance. Against these the church has 
often taken up arms. It has fought them because they 
have proved to be enemies of that which the church 
regards as sacred and worthy of preservation. Much 
of the so-called invasion of the social order on which 
the church has ventured in the past has been in the in¬ 
terest of the family. 

We are now discovering, too, that these families 
which we hoped would be permanent are caught up 
on the waves of economic and social change which 
sweep through communities and again rend asunder 
the religious bonds. We have accused people of being 
false to their religious vows; but gradually we are see¬ 
ing that family life is intimately related to the whole 
economic and social structure, and that it is impossible 
to solve the problems of the family by resting our con¬ 
fidence on religious formulas. It is therefore worth 
while for us seriously to study the implications involved 
in this close relationship between religion, the family 
and society. There may be meanings in it which we 


The Fate of the Family 


4 

have not yet probed, complications we have not sensed 
there may be a significance which is profound and of 
concern to all. Here are some of the questions with 
which we must deal: 

We propose, first of all, to discuss the nature of the 
family and of marriage in countries of the Orient. 
Families in the United States are different from those 
in the East and in Europe. We shall try to discover 
the genius of all families and then the genius peculiar 
to the American family. Another important question 
is: What is to be the fate of the American democratic 
system of marriage in both the capitalistic and social¬ 
istic state ? 

Then there are certain types of problems which are 
indigenous to family life; there are relationships be¬ 
tween husband and wife, parent and child, brother and 
sister, and these we must consider. The family is but 
one of a fellowship of organizations to which peo¬ 
ple give their allegiance; what shall be the proper re¬ 
lationship between the family, the neighborhood, the 
business and political organizations, and how can the 
members of the family successfully share their loyalty 
with other institutions? We shall also ask: What is 
the peculiar contribution which religion and the church 
make to family life ? Does the church have a function 
like that of the social worker, or one peculiarly its own ? 
We may decide that the function of the church is to 
deepen the sense of meaning in the family function. 
In that event we must ask how the church should go 
about it. What are the practical ways in which the 



Christianity and Family Life 5 

:church makes family life significant? Since not all 
religious behavior is good, when do religions behave 
badly and when do they behave well? 

These questions are of great practical importance at 
the present time. New social orders are rising which 
are seeking to impose the genius of the state upon the 
genius of the family. Many of the activities of the 
family are being invaded by the state. It is not yet 
clear what the fate of the family will be in the totali¬ 
tarian state which is now asserting itself. Those who 
would keep the family free must nevertheless recognize 
that our democratic society has left us with an atomistic 
theory of the family which has often robbed that in¬ 
stitution of its resources for romance and left it unre¬ 
lated to the other functions with which it should be 
joined in a great fellowship. 

Finally, what do we mean by the phrase, “ Whom 
God hath joined together ” ? 

In all types of marriage, with the exception of the 
romantic, family life exists for something larger than 
itself. In the Oriental marriage it exists for the con¬ 
tinuity and glory of the ancestral group; in the con¬ 
ventional marriage it exists for the glory of the class; 
in some European countries it exists for the glory of 
the state. In Christianity, however, the family exists 
for God, interpreted by the church. Can the Christian 
religion offer to the family that larger than self which 
is worthy of supreme devotion? 








Part One 


TYPES OF FAMILIES 





4 


\ 













I 


ORIENTAL MARRIAGE: 

THE TOTALITARIAN RACE 

ONLY IN comparatively recent times has the family, 
made up of father and mother and children, been a 
free unit in society. The Oriental system works for 
the freedom of the race but not for the freedom of the 
family. Millions of people in India and China live 
under a system which might be called a “ totalitarian 
racial economy.” More important than the state or the 
family unit is the ancestral racial economy. 

Some years ago, while traveling in the backwaters 
of the rivers which flow into the ocean in south India, 
I saw a young lad come out of the forest followed by 
a beautiful young girl. The two took their seats in a 
boat and rowed off out of sight down the river. My 
companion, a native of Travancore, remarked to me: 
“ There goes a young lad home with his bride. Prob¬ 
ably he never saw her until this morning and he is 
taking her to his father’s home.” I remarked to my 
friend, “ Did the young man have a chance to choose 
his bride ? ” “ No,” he said, “ his parents did that for 
him. He has had very little to say about it, and she 
has had nothing to say about it.” My Indian friend 
was acquainted with Western ways and, sensing my 
9 


10 


The Fate of the Family 


unexpressed doubt about a system which allows for no 
preliminary love-making in marriage, he remarked: 
“You Westerners fall in love and marry afterward. 
Here people marry and fall in love afterward. And,” 
he added, “ there is much to be said for our system.” 

While I was living in Calcutta I watched across the 
street from my place of residence a wedding ceremony 
which lasted over the better part of a week. There were 
processions with bands, riders mounted on camels, ele¬ 
phants and horses, gold- and silver-plated automobiles, 
banquets, and formal and informal visits. The bride 
was six years old and the groom was eight. They 
looked like toy people as they sat in a marvelously deco¬ 
rated car and rode away in the wedding procession. 
The affair was really a state occasion between two fami¬ 
lies. The bridegroom had had nothing to say about the 
planning of it. The families were hurrying it through 
before the passage of the Saarda Act which made such 
early marriages illegal in India. These children were 
going to join a larger family made up of grandfathers, 
grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins. They would 
know nothing of the responsibilities which two young 
people in the West take upon themselves when they 
establish a new home. They were not called upon to 
be self-supporting. Practically all the important ques¬ 
tions in the procedure and in their later life would be 
settled by the elders. “ Theirs not to reason why. . . .” 

It is difficult for those who are accustomed to the ro¬ 
mantic and individualistic ideas of the West to find 
such a system anything but objectionable. The defense 


Oriental Marriage 


ii 


of it I wish to offer is in the words of that most notable 
Indian poet, philosopher and prose writer, Rabindra¬ 
nath Tagore, found in Count Keyserling’s Boo\ of Mar¬ 
riage (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926): 

. . . The way to marriage which is shown by the 
torchlight of passion has not for its goal the wel¬ 
fare of society, but the satisfaction of desire. Even 
in Europe, where the obligation of the individual 
to society is much lighter than in India, it is well 
known how the mingling of the sexes under the 
impulse of passion often gives rise to antisocial dif¬ 
ficulties ; but there, society being mobile, the effects 
are not so deep as with us. In the shastras, there¬ 
fore, the Brahma marriage is considered to be the 
best. According to this, the bride should be given 
to the man who had not solicited her. If the in¬ 
stitution of marriage has to be regulated strictly 
from the social standpoint, room cannot be found 
for the personal wishes of the people concerned; 
so the system which obtains in the case of the royal 
houses of Europe is also the system which prevails 
throughout Hindu society. . . . (p. 108) 

In societies where the household is founded on 
the comfort and convenience of the individual, his 
acceptance or nonacceptance of the householder’s 
estate remains optional. If any such should say 
that he does not care for domestic joys, but prefers 
the freedom of irresponsibility, no room for objec¬ 
tion is left. But in Hindu India, because a house- 


12 


The Fate of the Family 


hold is an essential element in its social structure, 
marriage is almost compulsory — like conscription 
in Europe on the threat of war. 

According to our Lawgivers, anyone making 
gifts to, or taking gifts from, a Brahmin who re¬ 
mains a householder, but does not marry, goes to 
hell. Says Atri: “No hospitality should be ac¬ 
cepted from an unmarried householder.” The 
household has been compared in our shastras to a 
great tree, for, just as the roots of the latter support 
its branches, twigs, and foliage, so does the life of 
the household maintain the different institutions of 
society; and the Lawgiver lays it down that the 
king should do honor to the upholder of the house¬ 
holder’s estate. . . . (pp. 101-2) 

... It will then become clear that, in this type 
of society, having for its object the perfection of 
communal life, there is danger in allowing mar¬ 
riage to pursue the path of self-will. Such a so¬ 
ciety can withstand the encroachments of Nature 
only if its marriage system is walled around with 
a protective embankment. So the Hindu ideal of 
marriage has no regard for individual taste or in¬ 
clination — it is, rather, afraid of them. 

If any European would really understand the 
psychology behind this, let him bethink himself 
of the state of things that obtained during the last 
war. Ordinarily, in Europe, there is no bar to in¬ 
ternational marriages. But when the one objective 
of war overshadowed all other considerations, mar- 


Oriental Marriage 


*3 


riage with a subject of an enemy country became 
an impossibility; so much so, that European so¬ 
ciety felt no compunction in cruelly severing even 
long-standing marriage ties of this description. 
Not only was the marriage question affected, but 
during war conditions food and all other ameni¬ 
ties of life had to be cut down to a uniform stand¬ 
ard. The personal liberty and elasticity of occu¬ 
pation, so characteristic of Western civilization, 
tended wholly to disappear. 

These war conditions afford a good parallel to 
the permanent conditions which govern Hindu so¬ 
ciety, where the encroachment of alien cultures 
has always been a constant danger to be guarded 
against. This vital objective of the twice-born lead¬ 
ers who practically represented the whole people, 
therefore, runs as a steady undercurrent throughout 
our society. The problem of keeping its civiliza¬ 
tion pure having been acknowledged as all-impor¬ 
tant, and its solution thus sought by India, her 
society has had to claim for its members the severe 
and permanent curbing of their individual liberty 
of choice and action. . . . (pp. 104-5) 

Another way for the better understanding by the 
European of the mentality underlying our mar¬ 
riage system would be by reference to the discus¬ 
sions on eugenics which are a feature of modern 
Europe. The science of eugenics, like all other 
sciences, attaches little weight to personal senti¬ 
ment. According to it, selection by personal in- 


14 


The Fate of the Family 


clination must be rigorously regulated for the sake 
of the progeny. If the principle involved be once 
admitted, marriage needs must be rescued from 
the control of the heart and brought under the 
province of the intellect. Otherwise, insoluble 
problems will keep on arising for passion recks 
not of consequences, nor brooks interference by 
outside judges. . . . (p. 108) 

Here the question arises: If desire be banished 
from the very threshold of marriage, how can love 
find any place in wedded life? Those who have 
no true acquaintance with our country, and whose 
marriage system is entirely different, take it for 
granted that Hindu marriage is loveless. But do 
we not know of our own knowledge how false is 
such a conclusion? (p. hi) 

This brings to my mind the conversation I once 
had with an agriculturist. I was complaining to 
him of the lack of common grazing grounds in our 
villages, whereupon he told me that it was a mis¬ 
take to suppose that a cow would thrive best if 
allowed to graze at will. Scientific feeding with 
especially cultivated fodder crops only could yield 
the best results. These must have been the lines 
of argument, in regard to married love, pursued 
in our country. For the purpose of marriage spon¬ 
taneous love is unreliable; its proper cultivation 
should yield the best results — such was the con¬ 
clusion — and this cultivation should begin before 
marriage. Therefore, from their earliest years, the 


Oriental Marriage 


15 

husband as an idea is held up before our girls in 
verse and story, through ceremonial and worship. 
When at length they get this husband he is to them 
not a person but a principle, like loyalty, patriot¬ 
ism, or such other abstractions which owe their im¬ 
mense strength to the fact that the best part of 
them is our own creation and therefore part of our 
inner being. . . . (pp. 112-13) 

Tagore mentions two weaknesses in the Hindu sys¬ 
tem. The first is that it is so closely knit that the least 
loosening of the fiber in any of its parts tends to dis¬ 
ruption. It is afraid of the contact of the outside world 
because the bond which holds it together is that of 
external regulation whose strength depends upon habit¬ 
ual conformity. The other objection is that the special 
qualities of head and heart which once found varied 
support in a broad Indian social system are now dying 
for lack of exercise. 

The Indian system is almost identical with that of 
China. Here again we have the larger family taking 
control of the affairs of the married couple. From the 
imperial palace down to the lowest coolie’s house every 
family must have a shrine with wooden tablet bearing 
in writing the names of sacred ancestors. The con¬ 
trolling principle of the family is reverence for these 
ancestors, and the object of the family is to carry on 
that sacred stream of humanity which flows through 
the ancestors. To them a sacrificial ceremony, however 
simple, is performed at least three times a year. The 


16 The Fate of the Family 

book of rites says the object of all ceremonies is to bring 
down the spirits from above. In funeral rites the call¬ 
ing back of the soul of the deceased plays an important 
part. Sacrifices of food and clothing, designed to make 
the spirit happy, have in later years replaced the earlier 
elaborate offerings which included often sacrifice of 
human life. In ancestor worship, then, will be found 
the reason of the Chinese family’s existence. The pur¬ 
pose of marriage is the procreation of sons to carry on 
the family line. 

The Chinese family is patriarchal, which means that 
the father rules and kinship is through him. Woman, 
on marriage, leaves her family to become a part of her 
husband’s family. The oldest male of the family as¬ 
sumes authority. On the death of the father the oldest 
son becomes head. At one time the power of life and 
death was vested in the father. Inside the house, the 
wife of the oldest male of the oldest generation is head. 
She manages the home and the daughters-in-law and 
supervises the work and home industry. 

Five social virtues are emphasized in the family: 
filial piety, reverence for elders, faith between husband 
and wife, loyalty to the sovereign, and sincerity among 
friends. For every individual his ancestors are links in 
the chain which joins the Chinese to eternity. 

Instead of free courtship between young men and 
women such as we know in the romantic marriage, ar¬ 
rangements in China are taken in hand by the parents 
or by a middleman with the parents’ consent. The 
agreement of the parents is as binding as is the marriage 


Oriental Marriage 


17 

itself. Horoscopes are often read to find the right mate, 
to determine whether or not the couple will harmonize 
or supplement one another. A dowry paid by the man’s 
parents to the girl’s parents is supposed to cover what 
has been spent on the girl from her birth to her wed¬ 
ding — since she now ceases to be a part of her family 
and becomes a part of her husband’s family. 

The marriage ceremony is somewhat as follows: The 
groom sends a red chair with a member of his family, 
an uncle or someone who has many sons, to the home of 
the bride; the bride returns in the red chair and crosses 
the threshold of her husband’s home. Bowing to the 
family spirits and to the mother and father of the 
groom, the bride acknowledges allegiance to them. 
Eating wedding cakes together and drinking together 
from the same cup of wine, the bride and groom ac¬ 
knowledge their allegiance to each other. The bride 
is welcomed into the family by an aunt, or some woman 
of the husband’s family who is a mother of sons. Now 
that she has become a member of the family she owes 
her loyalty to it. 

Children are taught manners, customs and household 
duties within the family. Boys are taught to worship 
ancestors and household gods and the girls are prepared 
for marriage. The children are greatly loved and 
revered. 

The method of divorce is to return the wife to her 
first home and, often, to publish a notice of divorce in 
a newspaper. 

On almost the entire Asiatic continent this marriage 


18 The Fate of the Family 

system is prevalent. India’s 350,000,000 and China’s 
450,000,000 all maintain it. The system is basic to 
Asiatic life and therefore takes precedence over the 
whims or decisions of brides and grooms. 

If one has traveled in the Orient, one notices that the 
larger family of the Orient has developed its own type 
of household architecture. The different sub-units in 
a larger family have their separate households, but all 
the houses, instead of facing on the street or out into 
public life as they do in the West, face toward a private 
court which is the center of this larger family unit. 
This situation has a very real effect on what might be 
called the public-mindedness of the family. The family 
thinks first of the larger family, and the larger family 
has a tendency to think in terms of itself — a fact which 
gives rise to nepotism, or the tendency on the part of its 
members to look after the family’s interests. Those 
who have had something to do with administration in 
the Orient have found themselves wrestling with the 
problem of how to keep a prominent Chinese or a 
prominent Indian from giving all the jobs at his dis¬ 
posal to members of his family without regard to their 
fitness for public service. Of course, nepotism is not 
confined to the Orient, but there it exemplifies the way 
in which family life is more self-centered than public- 
minded. 

Perhaps it is not fair to call this the nonromantic type 
of marriage, because romance is organized around the 
ancestors, around the family gods, around the family 
welfare. And this type of romance, of course, has a 


Oriental Marriage 


19 


very great attraction for the individual member of the 
Chinese or Indian family. But as romance does not 
center in the feeling of the bride for the groom or the 
groom for the bride, on the whole it seems proper to 
call this the nonromantic type of marriage as distin¬ 
guished from the Western type. 


II 


CONVENTIONAL EUROPEAN MARRIAGE: 
THE TOTALITARIAN CLASS 

I TURN NOW to another great continent where the 
classes — of which three are recognized: peasantry, no¬ 
bility and royalty — constitute areas which set a limit 
and determine the bounds within which marriage can 
take place. The people of those three major classes 
marry not primarily for personal satisfaction but for the 
good of the class, for the glory of that for which the 
class stands. If the class has for its object the creation 
of a larger nation, then in a very real sense its mem¬ 
bers marry for the glory of the nation. This we at a 
distance have often recognized as being true of royalty. 
We have not realized that it is true also of peasantry 
and nobility. 

As clear a statement of the case for the European mar¬ 
riage of convenience as I know — and one that as we 
look back seems almost prophetic — is that contributed 
by Paul Thun to Keyserling’s Boo\ of Marriage . Mr. 
Thun was looking for the “ rejuvenation of Europe.” 
“ A prime factor in this rejuvenation,” he insisted, “ will 
be the coming back in all of its power of the marriage 
of convention.” He said: 

zo 


Conventional European Marriage 21 

We are entering a new heroic age. Sentiment 
will die a natural death. Liberalism [of course by 
that he means democracy] will become extinct on 
account of its weakness of character. Only courage 
has a future. The constructive element must win. 

(p- 154) 

This presupposes that marriage as the germ cell of 
history shall rest anew on the austere but beautiful 
ethos which is the characteristic of historical conven¬ 
tional marriage. The rebirth of this conception will 
lead to the rebirth of the nobility. He continued: 

. . . There is no other marriage worthy of the 
name than the conventional, in the sense of cul¬ 
tural marriage ... it is only this form of matri¬ 
mony which can lead mankind to the higher sig¬ 
nificance of things. . . . 

What is the conventional marriage ? In place of the 
marriage wherein the bride and groom center their 
romance in each other and have a large range of choice 
there is substituted the marriage whose purpose is the 
serving of one’s class, be it peasantry, nobility or royalty. 
Mr. Thun said: 

. . . Marriage has its roots lodged in the earth 
and is most intimately associated with nature. It 
is built up on the innate nature of the darkest of 
all human passions, and in its operation it should 
never deny this natural quality. Thus marriage 


22 The Fate of the Family 

represents a definite status for its origin is not due 
to any social order, no matter how primitive or 
vitally permanent, but it is a part of the cosmic 
order, the destiny of mankind. . . . Peasants, no¬ 
bles and kings constitute real classes. . . . To be a 
peasant, noble or a king is an organic vocation. 

When it [marriage] fulfills this meaning, when 
it keeps the objective always in sight, in the spirit 
as well as in the letter, then only does the blood 
and tissue of its race remain vital. The body 
which is inspired by a spiritual purpose cannot de¬ 
generate. . . . Here, in my opinion, is the secret of 
the preservation of races of hoary antiquity in the 
character of peasantry, nobility and royalty. These 
have not avoided inbreeding which tends to cause 
degeneration, but on the contrary, often seemed 
to foster it; yet they continue to exist, because their 
life is significant, whereas all other male lines 
usually perish within three generations. Where 
the spirit of a conscious order or class is not bent 
on the life of the day for its maintenance but on a 
distant future, the natural qualities that are particu¬ 
lar to a real class receive a special significance that 
amounts almost to a mystical charm, (p. 142) 

Mr. Thun went on to say that the devotion of a Euro¬ 
pean noble to his class is not unlike the consecration 
of the religious soul who contemplates the divinity of 
Christ. He acquires a mystical ecstasy in reflecting 
upon the purely human growth and earthly existence 


Conventional European Marriage 23 

of the Savior, just as the motherhood of the Virgin 
Mary urges us to express anew that most delicate of all 
secrets. Mr. Thun stated that in the higher orders, or 
classes, which depend entirely on their ethos, the nat¬ 
urally human attributes have, from the very beginning, 
been surrounded by an intrinsic charm which converts 
the most natural manifestation into something unique 
and wonderful. Evidently Mr. Thun was here referring 
to romance. But in place of the romance which the 
bride and groom or which lovers organize around one 
another, he was talking about the romance of the class 
— the romance of feeling that one is a member of the 
nobility, the romance of serving the state. “ This,” he 
said, “ is a substitute for their romantic love for each 
other.” 

It is at least an interesting thought that there are kinds 
of romance which can organize around marriage other 
than the romantic love of the bride and groom for each 
other. “ Only marriages,” said Mr. Thun, “ which com¬ 
ply with the conscious conception of class preserve the 
ethos of a whole race and consequently its vitality.” He 
attempted to give an illustration in the Jewish race: 

In spite of the annihilating tendency of the Di¬ 
aspora, the Jews all over the world have maintained 
their vitality because their powerful ethos was never 
allowed to become quiescent or enfeebled, but kept 
alive an ardent aspiration which was transmitted 
from one generation to another by means of con- 


24 


The Fate of the Family 


scious marriage ideals. How widespread the in- 
breeding and how slight the degeneracy! (pp. 
145-6) 

In other words, there is among the Jews a race morale 
which, communicating itself to the individual family, 
lifts it above the disorganization which would be char¬ 
acteristic of this family if it were dependent only upon 
its own resources. There seems to be here an addi¬ 
tional element of romance which reinforces the in¬ 
dividual romantic resources of the family. Our author 
explained that, in similar fashion, the nobility of Eu¬ 
rope, through the centuries, have had as a guiding 
principle for their lives and an unquenchable source 
of strength the thought that the conventional marriage 
was directed toward the welfare of the people, that it 
was secure from self-centeredness and prevented from 
becoming overschematized. There has been something 
which has lifted the conventional marriage far above 
the resources which are found only in the romantic 
feeling of two people for each other. Mr. Thun said: 

Taking into consideration the wonderful results 
of the conscious application of “ conventional mar¬ 
riage,” are the restrictions regarding choice of part¬ 
ners, the attaching of less importance to sensual 
love — in a word, the renunciation which is an in¬ 
tegral part of it — anything but a joyous and splen¬ 
did sacrifice ? It is a renunciation that is veritably 
born of an ardent affirmation of life and its sig¬ 
nificance. 


Conventional European Marriage 25 

It is due to human nature in its deepest sense that 
one finds in the highest circles of life the most 
striking examples of premeditated “ conventional 
marriage,” real marriage, the sharing of mutual 
destiny. Powerful above joy and sorrow, yes, over¬ 
whelming in its strength, is the ethos of woman. 
. . . Those who, according to their rank, live on 
the heights, if they really comply with the con¬ 
ditions laid down by their station in life, and do 
not conform merely outwardly thereto, are living 
super-personally. Even the impoverished nobleman 
lives super-personally, for pride of family and sta¬ 
tion give him a yearning beyond his own forgotten 
existence. And so does the peasant for he as¬ 
sumes responsibility for the holy heritage of the 
homestead and in his turn hands it on. In all 
these forms of life, women take an intimate and 
essential part. Because here it is a question of cos¬ 
mic classification, which is inherent in the econ¬ 
omy of the universe, marriage essentially means to 
her participation in the life ethos of man. ... In 
my opinion no other form of association deserves 
the title of marriage at all, for it cannot convey 
the wonderful meaning contained in the word 
“ marriage.” For other forms, a monstrous word 
coined by a sociologist is apt: Hausrat-Gemein - 
schaft — community of household goods, (p. 148) 

Thus ended his defense of the nonromantic conven¬ 
tional marriage. Such a conception undoubtedly 


2 6 


The Fate of the Family 


shocks and surprises one acquainted only with our ro¬ 
mantic type of American marriage where almost un¬ 
limited responsibility is thrust upon the bride and 
groom. One essential feature of it, however, should 
not escape our attention. There is romance in this 
picture. It is romance for something that is beyond 
marriage and is shared by both parties to the marriage. 
The romance, as portrayed by Mr. Thun, centers first 
of all around the consciousness of carrying on the 
great cosmic purpose of procreation, a purpose ex¬ 
pressed not in the individual family but in the class of 
which this individual family is a part. 

A second element is renunciation for the sake of the 
glory of one’s class. A great collective life stream repre¬ 
sented by a family, tracing its history back for a thou¬ 
sand years, rooted on some great estate for generations, 
glorified by all the symbols and ceremonies with which 
it is possible to glorify a class — this becomes an object 
worthy of loyalty. To sacrifice for this is no hardship; 
it is a joy. It is this something larger than marriage, 
this something that gives a sense of meaning to life and 
somewhat lessens the emphasis on personal likes and 
dislikes of the bride and groom that, I think, is signifi¬ 
cant in all types of conventional marriage. Perhaps 
it is this something which we need to add to our West¬ 
ern idea of romantic marriage in order to give a clearer 
meaning to it. Through our emphasis on one type of 
romance in marriage we may have sacrificed those other 
sources of romance preserved in what has been called 
the nonromantic type. In any case, as we turn now 


Conventional European Marriage 27 

to a study of what is commonly called “romantic” 
marriage let us keep in mind the fact that a very large 
number of the families of the world carry on with a 
romance of their own, which, though different, is just 
as real as that which we emphasize in the West. 


Ill 


DEMOCRACY AND THE ROMANTIC 
MARRIAGE 

THE ROMANTIC or democratic marriage is the ex¬ 
pression in terms of sex life of the democratic move¬ 
ment. First of all, let us get a picture of the democratic 
movement in its larger aspects in order that we may 
better understand this vital part of it. The rise of 
democracy was the consequence of a revolt against 
feudalism and the control exercised over society by the 
church and the feudal lords of the Middle Ages. Feu¬ 
dalism was patriarchal. Society was organized as a caste 
system. There were three orders: the kings, the no¬ 
bility and clergy, and the peasantry. The marriage of 
convention was a part of feudalism. 

Democracy came with the revolt of the middle classes 
and was built essentially around the rise of the trader. 
Up to this time, trading, moneylending and manufac¬ 
turing had been carried on under the feudal lords on 
great manors which were simple but complete social 
units. Society was organized from the top down. It 
was paternalistic and autocratic. 

Our greatest student of medieval society, James West- 
fall Thomson, said in his Economic and Social History 

i8 


Democracy and the Romantic Marriage 29 

of the Middle Ages (Century Co., 1928), that the most 
significant revolution in Western society was not the 
industrial revolution, but the emergence to power in 
the thirteenth century of the trader, the manufacturer 
and the moneylender. These men were the leaders in 
the new towns which under them became self-con¬ 
scious, fought with the feudal leaders and wrested 
power from them. For a time they sought in the great 
Hanseatic League to set up a town economy which 
would supplant the nation. The rising nationalism 
fought them back. 

Though the national idea seemed to triumph the men 
of the towns developed a new game. They let the 
nations control the army and they controlled the na¬ 
tions. From the fourteenth century the merchant trad¬ 
ers of western Europe sailed the seven seas with armies 
furnished by their respective nations. They set up 
their sea-trader citadels on the shores of all the great 
continents. Through military power they controlled 
great agricultural dependencies for the purpose of 
profitable trade. These men from the cities of west¬ 
ern Europe had a feeling for navigation. They knew 
the significance of tariffs, customs and currency rates. 
John Calvin taught them that it was right to take in¬ 
terest and to trade for profit. They were more pious 
than ethical. John Hawkins, carrying slaves from 
Sierra Leone to Spain in a ship called the “ Jesus of 
Lubeck,” counseled his crew “ to serve God daily, love 
one another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire and 
seek good company.” 


30 The Fate of the Family 

These merchant seamen founded such centers of 
trade as Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Here for 
one hundred and fifty years their sons carried on with 
the help of yeomen, and then, because they needed 
navigation laws, tariff and currency rates, they staged a 
revolution against the sea traders of the home country. 
The issues in this revolution, according to the historian, 
Charles A. Beard, were: (i) navigation acts; (2) laws 
restricting freedom of trade; (3) restriction of colonial 
manufacture; (4) currency rates favorable to the cred¬ 
itor class; and (5) taxation without representation — all 
causes dear to the trader heart. 

The trader class has written the tariff laws of this 
country and has created a situation in which the bargain¬ 
ing power of the manufacturer is almost double that of 
the farmer with whom he bargains. It has also written 
most of the tax laws of the country and has succeeded 
in loading an undue burden on the common man. 
Favored as this class has been, it has voted itself un¬ 
believably large incomes for doing the things which 
traders do; incomes which make the kings of the feudal 
ages look like poverty-stricken beggars; incomes which 
are out of all proportion to any possible return which 
they can render to society. They have taken for them¬ 
selves two-thirds of the price of every food product 
which is on its way from the farmer to the masses of the 
city. As a result, there has been an overamplification 
of what men do in cities. The size and opulence of 
the city is out of all proportion to the usefulness of what 
it does. The last one hundred years have seen the un- 


Democracy and the Romantic Marriage 31 

precedented growth of the city as the outstanding social 
phenomenon of a trader-controlled world. 

Even more important than the growth of the cities 
have been the standards of living and ethical goals of 
society set by this trader class. In The Epic of America , 
James Truslow Adams, who was once a businessman, 
has told us the story of the moral debacle which took 
place in the middle of the last century when money¬ 
making as an end in itself displaced the dream of the 
welfare of the common man as the goal of American 
society: 

Money-making having become a virtue, it was no 
longer controlled by the virtues but ranked with 
them and could be weighed against them where 
any conflict occurred. The quick development of 
an industry or a tract of land and the making of 
a million dollars to be added to the capital re¬ 
sources of the nation could be weighed as exhibi¬ 
tions of moral and patriotic virtue against breaches 
of other exhibitions of virtue such as justice or hon¬ 
esty. Raising money-making to the rank of a 
patriotic and moral virtue was the cancer that ate 
deep into the vitals of our life. It meant the de¬ 
moralization of our whole attitude toward law and 
public life. (p. 191) 

It would be foolish to underestimate the social ad¬ 
vantages of the rule of the trader class. Along with 
this rule has come the growth of science with the sub¬ 
sequent uniting of the world, if not in brotherhood, at 


32 The Fate of the Family 

least in neighborhood, through the marvelous victory 
over time and space accomplished by the steamship, 
railroad, airplane, telegraph and radio. It has been the 
mission of the trader class to tie the world together in 
a great system of interrelated trade. 

Out of the struggle of the trader against feudalism 
came certain great slogans which express a social 
philosophy — democracy — largely organized around 
the rights of the individual. These slogans include the 
demand for free speech, free press, private initiative in 
business, emphasis on the sacredness of private prop¬ 
erty, the right of private judgment, of self-determina¬ 
tion, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happi¬ 
ness. It is not unfair, I think, to say that democracy 
as a working philosophy is an emphasis on rights. It 
is the philosophy by which the peoples of the world 
have declared themselves free from what they con¬ 
sider to be overarching tyrannies; kings have suffered 
ill at the hands of democracy. This philosophy has 
paralleled the Western career of capitalism and is es¬ 
sentially what we mean by rugged individualism. 

Along with this movement in business and politics 
has come a similar movement in the organization of 
the family. Many people believe that it is a delayed 
movement so far as the family is concerned; that be¬ 
cause of the intimate, tender relationships in family 
life, there has been a tendency to maintain in the 
family longer than anywhere else the ideas of the feudal 
authoritarian economy. The pace has been slower, 
perhaps, but nevertheless the home has shared in the 
democratic movement. 


Democracy and the Romantic Marriage 33 

Let us compare the democratic marriage with the 
marriage of convention. In the first place, the demo¬ 
cratic marriage has its roots in the free association of 
boys and girls in a coeducational public school system 
or in some other association where there are abundant 
opportunities for comradeship and courtship. Most 
of us cannot remember the time when we did not make 
dates with the other sex. Moreover, this courtship is 
highly competitive. Love-making is always competi¬ 
tive everywhere, but the American variety is the most 
highly competitive in the world. It is courting not only 
by men, but also by women. Courting is made more 
competitive by accessories of wealth — luxury, high- 
powered automobiles, ease and quickness of transporta¬ 
tion. Hardly more than a generation ago the number 
of girls a man could court was determined by the dis¬ 
tance he could drive the old family horse and top 
buggy; today he can court all the girls in the range of 
a high-powered automobile. The courtings are fol¬ 
lowed by democratic choices. 

The marriage service is now modified so that the bride 
seldom promises to obey, or if she does it is with distinct 
reservations. The subject is generally recognized as one 
to be settled later. The young people go to live in a 
house or apartment of their own which fronts, not like 
the house in the Oriental compound on a privately de¬ 
termined court, but on the street. In a modern apart¬ 
ment it is a distinct understanding that nothing stands 
beween this particular family and their own self-deter¬ 
mined loyalties outside. 

These two young people are expected to spend a 


The Fate of the Family 


34 

great deal of their time alone. No larger family adds 
its resources of sociability. In the Orient, the young 
couple joins a family within which there is already 
a rich social life. There will be brothers with their 
wives and children, aunts, uncles, grandfathers — form¬ 
ing a distinct little community. No such community 
exists (probably wisely, perhaps nobody desires it) for 
the democratic family of the West. The dowry in 
American life is unusual. No larger family shares the 
burden of financial support. No other families are 
started with as large a burden of self-support thrown 
upon a bride and groom as our American romantic 
family. Sometimes it is this very burden which causes 
the romance to fade as the days go by. 

The Western married couple live in a highly com¬ 
petitive life, especially in a highly competitive financial 
world. They must make for themselves major decisions 
in finance and in household management. They are 
subject to free associations with people outside the mar- 
riage group. If the bride goes to work she is in an 
office where there are many men; if the husband is 
working he is in an office where there are many women 
— and no purdah system puts blinders on the roving eye 
in Western society. Moreover, women by legal right 
now inherit half of the joint property. If a woman 
chooses to be a “ gold digger,” she can in many cases 
become independent. In any kind of separation, either 
by death or divorce, by the law itself she becomes pos¬ 
sessor of half of the family inheritance or half of the 
family financial ability. 


Democracy and the Romantic Marriage 35 

The factory has taken most of the economic burden 
from the home. The husband must make money 
enough to buy what the factory will sell. It is not 
often realized that one reason why the modern man is 
so confined to his business is that he now has to provide 
funds with which to buy that which his grandmother 
made at home. Modern opportunity for industrial 
work for women frees them from the economic neces¬ 
sity of marriage and at the same time multiplies com¬ 
petition for the man. The school stands ready to take 
care of the children almost from the nursery until they 
march out of the university with a Ph.D. degree. The 
necessity of bearing children at all has been obviated by 
modern methods of contraception. 

This is, in general, the picture of the democratic 
family. It varies, of course, as between country and city. 
In the country families still carry on a large part of 
the activities of the farm. 

Many of those who feel that the democratic prin¬ 
ciple has arrived late in family life are desirous of ex¬ 
tending it. They feel that the burden of tradition, of 
authority, of mystery and custom, still lies heavily on 
the democratic family, and that if the family is to ad¬ 
vance as far in its revolt against authoritarianism as 
has business and politics, there is still a long road for 
it to travel. But those who would carry the democratic 
principle to its limit fail to meet the question answered 
by the other two types of marriage we have studied. 
They do not, in terms of something larger than itself, 
tell us for what purpose democratic marriage exists. 


The Fate of the Family 


36 

They make the likes and dislikes of two individuals an 
end in themselves. What, in the romantic marriage, 
offers substitutes for those resources of morale which 
are found to be so real in the Oriental marriage and the 
marriage of convention ? The case for and against the 
romantic marriage can be stated as below. 

A rough classification of the functions and their cor¬ 
responding institutions in society would look some¬ 
what as follows: 

Religion Sex Education Economics Government 

Church Family School Business State 

Under feudalism these functions and institutions were 
bound together in something of an organic whole un¬ 
der the church. In the Orient they were organized 
under the family. 

The movement of society in the East and West has 
been in the direction of freeing the genius of each of 
these institutions from the tyranny of the others. In¬ 
side these institutions there has been the tendency to 
free each part from the control of any other part. This, 
however, was never the whole of the democratic move¬ 
ment. It was always assumed that the parts which had 
been freed would come together in some kind of a new 
social arrangement. The democratic movement never 
intended a fragmented society. The freeing of the 
parts from mutual tyranny was in the interest of a new 
associated fellowship. The fact remains, however, that 
democracy has, in too many cases, stopped far short 


Democracy and the Romantic Marriage 37 

of fulfillment. It is from this angle that we wish to 
view the very real merits, and the equally real faults, 
of the romantic marriage. 

First, the Western marriage has made great progress 
in freeing the genius of the family from the other 
functions of society; it has made equal progress in 
freeing the members of the family from one another. 
On the other hand, it has laid very little emphasis on 
the terms on which these free institutions and these 
free individuals are to form a new organic association. 
In a word, the romantic marriage has stopped half 
way in its march toward its goal. 

Second, the romantic marriage is built on a founda¬ 
tion of affection and love. Its ideal of unselfish devo¬ 
tion endows it with the highest moral quality. A system 
which evokes such a highly social idea to a great extent 
justifies its existence. 

Third, the democratic marriage satisfies the worth¬ 
while elements of individualism as a legitimate exten¬ 
sion of the principle of voluntary choice which is a 
characteristic of civilization as over against primitive 
barbarism. There was a time when wives were stolen; 
now they are courted. There was a time when men 
seized the reins of power by force; now they must be 
elected. There was a time when the strong took the 
food they wanted; now they must buy it. The ro¬ 
mantic marriage is an extension of the philosophy of 
consent which is one of the characteristics of a free 
society, and it belongs through spirit and form in that 
constellation of activities to which we give the collec- 


The Fate of the Family 


38 

tive name, democracy. This is the point at which the 
Oriental marriages have failed and it is also the point 
from which to criticize the new totalitarian societies. 

Finally, the romantic marriage insures against caste; 
when the right of choice is not limited by traditional 
lines no caste system can with any success fasten itself 
upon society. It has all the advantages of free compe¬ 
tition in any line. 

There is small likelihood that, having tasted the joys 
of courtship, young people will turn the prerogative of 
selection back to their parents — a prerogative inex¬ 
tricably bound up with all other rights in a society in 
which men and women claim the right to make choices. 
The romantic marriage is the emotional core of all our 
social life and for this reason it becomes the central 
function in the whole democratic movement. There 
is in it something more powerful than economic de¬ 
terminism. We are more likely to determine our prop¬ 
erty relationships on the basis of the way we organize 
our families than we are to organize our families on 
the basis of property laws — a fact which the proponents 
of economic determinism might seriously consider. 

The principal weakness, however, of the romantic 
marriage lies in its failure to recognize that all life 
must be individual and collective. Feudalism was or¬ 
ganic. Religion, economics, marriage and politics, all 
were part of an organic whole. The romantic marriage 
is an isolated unit in an atomistic society. Its defenders 
fail to recognize that the pleasure of freedom of choice 
is transitory unless it is reinforced by auxiliary joys 


Democracy and the Romantic Marriage 39 

drawn from the great social will to live from which we 
come and for which we must carry on. The free in¬ 
dividual is not an end in himself. 

The romantic marriage has a sound basis. It is the 
free act of two individuals of reasonable maturity be¬ 
tween whom the tides of passion run strong. But ro¬ 
mance is soon exhausted unless the family is willing to 
mobilize new and deeper resources than those affixed 
to passion. When two young people start on the great 
adventure they are often not equipped with a social 
philosophy adequate for that adventure. 

The romantic marriage has not accepted its respon¬ 
sibility as the center of a constellation of free social 
functions, each of which must exist for something more 
than itself. Those who build families will have to ac¬ 
cept this fact. Society cannot endure chaotic relation¬ 
ships in its central function. Those who form families 
must recognize that they must consciously take over 
the task of creating for the family function a meaning¬ 
ful place in society, or they will become to a great ex¬ 
tent responsible for a totalitarian social order through 
regimentation by some outside force that will com¬ 
mand the unity they fail to give. 



















I 


Part Two 


THE MENACE OF INDIVIDUALISM 









IV 


THE BETRAYAL OF THE FAMILY 

MARRIAGE IS essentially an experience in associated 
living. There are times when every individual in the 
family must guard his rights; but democracy, inter¬ 
preted as a philosophy of rights, is not all-inclusive 
enough to take care of the situation. A nation cannot 
be built out of 120,000,000 little Patrick Henrys, each 
shouting, “ Give me liberty or give me death! ” Like¬ 
wise, a family cannot be formed by individuals who 
seek only personal liberty. When father, mother, 
brothers and sisters all seek individual liberty, the fam¬ 
ily disintegrates. Personalities clash. The home be¬ 
comes a place of many tensions. The romantic family 
is being destroyed by those who interpret democracy 
only in terms of individualism. 

Grasping the principle of individualism, many of 
those who would improve the democratic type of mar¬ 
riage have sought to apply it to the family. They have 
developed what Beatrice Hinkle, an ardent defender 
of the romantic marriage, has called “ the cult of the 
ego,” based on impatient revolt from the old tradition 
and law-impelled domination of the husband and fa¬ 
ther. To some extent they are justified, for it should 
43 


The Fate of the Family 


44 

be recognized that the family has been an agency for 
enlarging the ego of the man. In the first place, the 
woman has had to take the man’s name; I do not know 
of anything which flatters the ego of man more thor¬ 
oughly than does that. For a long time it was only the 
man who could own property. The man was consid¬ 
ered the head of the family. Those who are trying to 
improve marriage now say that the period has come 
when man is no longer to have this monopoly on 
egoism in family life. The child has a personality 
which is to be respected; the wife has a personality. 
All have a right to feel themselves individuals in the 
family. Judge Ben Lindsey feels that the restrictions 
of old customs in family life thwart the lives of both 
the woman and children, and often of the man also. 
But the efficacy of the individualistic principle as a 
formula for improving society in other relations is very 
much in doubt and is being challenged on many sides. 
In fact, it is now a discarded principle in most of the 
other phases of Western culture — philosophy, ethics, 
religion, economics — which have hitherto been oper¬ 
ating under it. 

Let us take, for example, the philosophers. Not long 
ago the South African soldier and philosopher, J. C. 
Smuts, in Holism and Evolution (Macmillan Co., 1926), 
developed the thesis that for the greatest good to the 
greatest number the whole is more important than the 
part. He called attention to the fact that for three hun¬ 
dred years we have been magnifying the part; now, 
society is involved in a great reverse movement in which 


The Betrayal of the Family 45 

the importance of the whole is emphasized over that 
of the part. 

Last autumn, in Lawrence, Kansas, I met an ardent 
advocate of the Gestalt point of view. On the walls of 
his office was a chart which revealed that until about the 
fourteenth century society had been moving in the di¬ 
rection of an emphasis on the importance of the whole 
as against the part. Then there was a great dip in the 
curve of his chart indicating that from the fourteenth 
century until quite recently the situation had been com¬ 
pletely reversing itself. Now the curve was once more 
turning upward, and my friend predicted that it had 
not yet reached its height, that perhaps in 1945 or 1950 
this curve, which indicates the right of the whole as 
against the part, might reach once more its zenith; then 
he expected to see it straighten out once more in a re¬ 
newed appreciation of the individual, the two ideals 
would balance, and we would obtain something of a 
perfect philosophy. 

I think the man was essentially right from the stand¬ 
point of the philosopher. We are recognizing now, for 
instance, that “ family ” is a word which signifies a total 
group. Words like “ father,” “ mother,” “ child,” get 
their meaning from the collective term, “family,” 
which gives to father, mother and child a status. The 
family is the unit which creates the vocation of hus¬ 
band, wife and child. It is not possible for the hand 
to say to the body, “ I am of more importance than you 
are.” For the hand is nothing apart from the body. 
It is the body which creates the vocation for the hand. 


46 The Fate of the Family 

The same idea is becoming prevalent among ethical 
writers. Dr. Richard Cabot, in his Meaning of Right 
and Wrong (Macmillan Co., 1934), deals with those 
great agreements into which we enter with others to 
accomplish that which we cannot accomplish by our¬ 
selves. Ten, fifteen or twenty years ago, when a man 
wrote a book on ethics he started from the standpoint 
of the individual, examining the desires of the indi- * 
vidual, asking what meant his happiness and what his 
source of duty. Now ethical philosophers start out by 
assuming society, not the individual, as the base line. 
They recognize what I think is true — that most of us 
can do very little by our own efforts. Most of what is 
worth while we do in company with other people. 

When I was a young lad I lived an isolated life on a 
farm. I wanted to play baseball but there, were no 
people to be organized into a ball team. There was 
an old straw shed on our farm and up against that I 
placed an image of a man who was supposed to repre¬ 
sent a batter, and then I would get off the proper dis¬ 
tance from the batter’s plate and throw to the image. 
The ball would sink into the straw shed. I would re¬ 
trieve it and throw it once more. It was my desperate 
attempt to make a baseball team out of one person. Of 
course it can’t be done. 

You cannot get an education by yourself. Education 
is a great co-operative adventure; libraries represent the 
collective wisdom of the past. The self-educated man 
does not exist. 

You cannot through your efforts alone get your morn- 


The Betrayal of the Family 47 

ing breakfast. Modern society is seeing more and more 
plainly that the feeding of the world is a great co¬ 
operative enterprise, and the man who looks upon that 
enterprise merely as something through which he can 
gain without contributing, is simply fooling himself. 

You cannot travel alone; you must have great high¬ 
ways with their traffic lights and regulations. I noticed 
in the newspaper a few weeks ago that during the 
week-end one hundred and twenty-five people were 
killed on the highways of America. Why ? I suspect 
many were killed because they did not recognize that 
traveling is a co-operative adventure. They were think¬ 
ing of their own right to speed. They were pleased 
with their ability to dodge traffic lights and to cut in 
and out of the traffic. And one hundred and twenty- 
five deaths was the result. 

Of course, you cannot have recreation alone. Most 
recreation is gained in terms of some game you enter 
into with other people, in which you must observe the 
rules of the game and be a good sport. 

Thus we see a more social conception has come into 
all ethical thinking. We assume a society to start with, 
a whole so important that we find our place only as 
we participate in it. The same attitude is gaining 
ground in religion. For a hundred years we empha¬ 
sized the right of people to organize any kind of reli¬ 
gious group which seemed to them privately desirable. 
As a result, we have over two hundred denominations 
in the United States. We have been very reluctant to 
override the private right of others to organize their 


48 The Fate of the Family 

separate branches of religious groups. But now we are 
saying: “You shall not crucify a community on the 
cross of your private desires in religion. The commu¬ 
nity has rights. If you are in the community as a 
church it is your business to serve the community, to 
respect its integrity, to work for its unity. You shall 
not crucify it on the cross of denominational glory.” 
Thus, in all these various ways the principles of indi¬ 
vidualism are being modified by principles which grow 
out of convictions concerning the right of society as a 
whole. 

Strange to say, little thinking in this direction has 
been done with reference to the family. We have not 
made the transition in family life that we have made 
in these other realms. We are still in the hands of in¬ 
dividualists who do not see that, even as one cannot 
build political, economic and religious life on the doc¬ 
trine of individualism, so one cannot build family life 
on that doctrine — and any persistent attempt to do so 
drives one toward futility. To indicate that this is not 
alone my theory, let me quote from at least one other 
contributor to thought in this realm.' Ricarda Huch, 
in Keyserling’s Boo\ of Marriage, says: 

The romanticists paid too little attention to the 
fact that man is ordained to establish communities 
which have priority over the rights of any one in¬ 
dividual. (p. 193) 

She is discussing the romantic marriage here. In an¬ 
other place this writer says: 


The Betrayal of the Family 49 

The romanticists looked upon marriage as essen¬ 
tially a private marriage affecting two persons. It 
never struck them that society had an interest in 
such relationships and still less did they realize 
that it had a right to lay stress upon this point. We 
are at the summit of an individualistic age so far as 
marriage is concerned. 

The democratic family needs a new social philoso¬ 
phy. That social philosophy must focus not on the 
individual but on those great agreements which com¬ 
plete the life of the individual and which make it pos¬ 
sible for him to become a social person. Such a philoso¬ 
phy has been stated in Dr. Henry Churchill King’s The 
Laws of Friendship, Human and Divine (Macmillan 
Co., 1910). In applying the laws of associated living 
to the family, Dr. King says family life is not possible 
unless there is integrity of character, mutual self-revela¬ 
tion and answering trust, and a common fund of in¬ 
terests. In following such a philosophy there must be 
subordination of the rights of the individual in the 
interest of a larger good. 


V 


THE SELF-CENTERED MIND 

RICHARD BAXTER was a prolific and tiresome 
writer on social ethics but he wrote to the point when 
he enumerated the sins most directly contrary to godli¬ 
ness. These sins are also contrary to all social conduct. 
They are: unbelief, hardness of heart, hypocrisy, inor¬ 
dinate man-pleasing, pride, covetousness and the mas¬ 
ter sin of sensuality, flesh-pleasing or voluptuousness. 
These major bad habits still thwart good social living. 
The following case record, covering the rise and fall 
of a contemporary family, testifies to the significance of 
Richard Baxter’s insights: 

When Dora finished high school it was her mother 
who insisted that she go to the university where she 
could continue with her music and at the same time 
acquire the culture which seemed to be demanded of 
modern young people. On matriculating at the uni¬ 
versity Dora discovered there was a chance to try out 
for the a cappella choir in the West Presbyterian 
Church. It was under the direction of a reputable voice 
teacher, and membership in his choir was equal to a 
course in voice training. She was not accepted until 
the following year, but once enrolled she made the best 

5 ° 


The Self-Centered Mind 51 

use of the opportunity during the three remaining 
years. 

While in the university she met David. The ac¬ 
quaintance grew into a romance. It seemed quite natu¬ 
ral that she and David should be planning to get mar¬ 
ried shortly after their graduation. David had no plans 
for professional study, consequently the normal choice 
for him seemed to be that of joining his father in the 
telephone office. It was an opportunity for a job, and 
he needed a salary on which he and Dora could get 
married. His father’s prestige gave him the opportu¬ 
nity he sought. Apparently everything was in his fa¬ 
vor. When he and Dora were married the next fall, 
his father furnished their apartment for them. Was it 
any wonder that Dora’s friends considered her a lucky 
girl? 

Since Dora had been a member of the choir as a stu¬ 
dent, she was invited to continue when she made her 
new home in Mainton. It was a joy to resume this 
happy activity of student days, so Dora accepted as 
eagerly as when she first became a member. Singing 
regularly in West Church seemed to be an adequate 
reason for joining. When she united with the church 
on profession of faith, David transferred his letter from 
the downtown church where his father was an elder. 
The church now became a part of the home-making 
enterprise. Soon David was appointed an usher. The 
West Church was growing, and ushering was a particu¬ 
lar task. He was proud of his ability to recognize faces 
and remember names, and he accepted his duties seri- 


52 The Fate of the Family 

ously. They were enthusiastic young home-makers, 
who shared their happiness as only lovers can. Home¬ 
making was a beautiful new adventure. 

Dora had to leave the choir a few months before 
George was born. The coming of the baby gave them 
a new interest, seemed to sanctify their affection and 
bind them more closely to each other. David found a 
new inducement to work at his job. He was promoted 
to more responsible positions and his salary was more 
than adequate for their needs. The first six years of 
their married life seemed almost ideal. With an ade¬ 
quate income, a wholesome group of friends and 
healthy church contacts, they had all the resources for 
a stable family life. They felt that they had laid well 
the foundations for a happy home. 

About this time they thought it would be wise to 
enlarge their circle of friends. The small church group 
had become boresome to Dora. Her interest had waned 
since she stopped singing in the choir. She wanted 
wider associations. David also believed that a wider 
acquaintance would be good for both of them. The 
bridge club proved to be one outlet. They entertained 
frequently. 

At first it was just a few friends in for an evening 
of bridge. When some of their new friends served 
liquor at their parties, it seemed to David and Dora 
that they must reciprocate. One could afford to be 
liberal in such things for the sake of friendship. When 
some of their old crowd frowned on such a procedure, 
the only result was further to alienate David and Dora 


The Self-Centered Mind 53 

from their former companions and tie them more 
closely to the fast set. 

It was not long before they were drinking too much. 
Everybody in their crowd was doing it and they 
seemed to be having a good time. David went on a 
stag party occasionally, leaving Dora at home with 
George. She resented this and it was the cause of their 
first quarrel. David refused to cut himself off from 
his convivial friends and told Dora that she ought not 
to deprive him of a little fun with the boys, so long as 
he provided well for her and George. Anyway he 
needed some relaxation while carrying the heavier bur¬ 
dens of his work. 

David got to staying out all night now and then, 
but Dora did not care to have another quarrel; so she 
was patient and did not ask too many questions. Sat¬ 
urday night seemed to be a proper time for David’s 
night out with the boys. Poker and liquor did not fit 
well into the church schedule on Sunday morning. 
David usually slept until noon on Sunday. 

They kept George in Sunday school. When he was 
a little older he rebelled and said he wanted to stay 
home on Sunday “ like Daddy.” Dora tried to per¬ 
suade George to go but did not offer to go with him. 
David decided that George did not need to go if he 
preferred to stay at home. He would not force the 
boy to comply with the rigid church discipline of his 
own youth. George had his own life to live and he 
would allow him to make up his own mind. David 
felt that this liberty had been denied him and he had 


The Fate of the Family 


54 

carried this resentment through the years. He had 
felt it all the more keenly of late since his parents 
had become concerned over their church neglect. The 
elder Grants had transferred their letters to the West 
Church hoping to maintain the family church inter¬ 
est. David saw through that. He wondered if the 
“ old man ” thought he could still dominate him as if 
he were a little boy. He would show his father that 
he had grown up. If he wanted to cut loose from the 
church he had a perfect right to do so. The sooner his 
father learned that, the better it would be for all of 
them. 

His pastor, always regarded as an intimate friend, 
saw the trend of affairs and had a personal visit with 
David. He tried to appeal to David for the sake of 
his son. David explosively told his pastor of his grow¬ 
ing resentment toward his rigid training and affirmed 
that his own son would never be subjected to the same 
church tyranny that he had endured. He exaggerated 
some of the main points and felt that he had been able 
to make out a pretty good case for himself. He and 
Dora would let George make his own decisions about 
religion. In the end he would probably be a better 
church man than his father. David was sure he had 
proved his point. 

When Dora heard that David had been seen at a 
roadhouse with a young woman when he was sup¬ 
posed to have been at an all-night stag party, she was 
not surprised. She had suspected it for some time, but 
had gone on with their crowd, closing her eyes to the 


The Self-Centered Mind 55 

facts she feared. The evidence was now conclusive. 
She decided that she and David must come to terms. 
Their life could not go on as it had been. She loved 
George too much to allow the dissolution of their 
home. She resolved to have a frank talk with David. 
If he would not agree to break off his relations with 
this adventuress, she would demand the same privi¬ 
leges for herself. She was still young, was not lack¬ 
ing in physical charm, and she knew several men who 
would not be averse to her advances. She was certain 
that such a proposal would bring David to his senses, 
and that he would be furious over the prospect of her 
loose conduct. 

He admitted the truth of the rumors which she had 
heard, but showed no signs of penitence or willing¬ 
ness to give up his affair. Wounded to the heart, but 
still defiant, Dora demanded her freedom as she had 
resolved to do. Much to her surprise David acquiesced. 
He said it would be all right with him as long as she 
did not interfere with his affairs. 

Apparently there was nothing for Dora to do but to 
carry out her threat. She still hoped that David would 
relent when he saw that she meant to go on with her 
proposal. Her threat was easy to carry out. It was not 
long until she too was spending the night away from 
home. George, left much to himself, got into trouble. 
He and a group of other young men were arrested for 
stealing an automobile. Since neither his father nor 
mother could be reached, George thought it might be 
a good idea to call their pastor. 


56 The Fate of the Family 

David and Dora seemed to be somewhat sobered by 
this event, but neither of them would give in to the 
other. The minister thought it was time to talk again 
with Dora. He accomplished nothing. She admitted 
the truth of all he said but would make no promises. 
To his final question, “ Dora, what about the future ? ” 
she replied, “ I do not allow myself to think about the 
future.” George was now a real problem. David and 
Dora gave some serious consideration to his welfare 
but came to no agreement about their own conduct. 
They agreed to send George to military school. It 
seemed the easiest way out. They would then be free 
to follow their own wishes for the greater part of the 
year. 

The telephone company was now deeply concerned 
over David’s dissipation. His office duties were being 
neglected. The habits he had developed and the repu¬ 
tation he had acquired were not regarded as helpful 
assets. However, it was difficult to discharge him in 
view of his father’s flawless record. In a private con¬ 
ference of the directors, in which the elder Grant was 
invited to participate, it was decided to make David 
district manager in Hicktown, a small city one hun¬ 
dred miles distant. This would get him and Dora 
away from the fast set and give them a chance to 
straighten out their tangled lives. It was a distinct 
demotion, with the understanding that he was being 
given another chance. If he and Dora decided to break 
off their present associations and start afresh it was as¬ 
sumed that he would again be in line for promotion. 


The Self-Centered Mind 57 

There was a scene when David broke the news to 
Dora. She vowed that she would never leave Mainton. 
David could go to the little “ hick town ” if he wanted 
to. She would stay among her friends and expect 
David to support her and George. David adopted a 
rare mood of calm. He refused to get excited. His 
job was at stake. He could not afford to lose control 
of himself. He wanted Dora to look at the situation 
as a business proposition. Dora had made it clear that 
she did not love him any more. She had an admirer 
with whom she spent as much time as he could give 
her. It was a killing pace that she was going and she 
knew it. Once it was started there seemed no place to 
stop. Here was a chance to stop but she did not want 
to. David’s mood finally won with Dora. She was 
willing to accept his proposition. For the sake of ap¬ 
pearances she would go as his wife to Hicktown, on 
certain conditions. She demanded that he secure an 
apartment at the best hotel where separate living quar¬ 
ters could be provided for them. They could share a 
common reception and living room, but she must have 
a separate bedroom and kitchenette. This arrange¬ 
ment would enable her to entertain the men who came 
to visit her, and still maintain the semblance of marital 
respectability. 

David was disappointed. He had begun to tire of 
the fast life. He realized that he could not keep his 
job and keep up the pace he and Dora were traveling. 
He had hoped that Dora would be willing to join him 
in the effort to reinstate himself. Since she would not 


The Fate of the Family 


58 

do so, he agreed to the conditions she imposed, hoping 
that he could eventually win her back. But Dora ad¬ 
hered to her original proposition. It was only for the 
sake of a respectable appearance that she had come. 
She would abide by the agreement as a business propo¬ 
sition. She was willing to appear at public functions 
with her husband and live in the same apartment with 
him, but she declined to perform the functions of a 
wife any longer. Her admirer in Mainton was near 
enough for frequent visits, and she preferred to share 
the intimacies of a wife with him. 

When David was transferred to Hicktown the presi¬ 
dent of the telephone company wrote the local pastor 
of the Presbyterian church and opened the way for a 
church contact. The pastor and his wife called on the 
Grants shortly after they were settled at the hotel. An 
old fraternity brother of David’s in Hicktown used his 
influence in trying to establish church connections for 
them. The president of the Presbyterian Woman’s 
Guild took Dora to their semi-monthly meeting in an 
effort to establish new friendships. To all church over¬ 
tures the Grants were unresponsive. They let it be 
known that they had not been much interested in 
church for some time and had no intention of joining 
a church until they found the group of friends who ap¬ 
pealed to them. Apparently nothing could be accom¬ 
plished by pressing the invitation, so the pastor and 
members of the Presbyterian church continued to be 
friendly and interested, but David and Dora always had 
other engagements which prevented their attendance at 
church functions. 


The Self-Centered Mind 59 

Dora’s unwillingness to co-operate and the lure of 
old associations led David to find some congenial 
women friends, with whom he shared the privacy of 
his bedroom. It was an arrangement that was doomed 
to failure from the start. The Grants were soon the 
scandal of the town. Gossip traveled faster there than 
it did in Mainton. Dora was out of town most of 
the following summer with George. David was seen 
frequently with a divorcee of unsavory reputation. 
Tongues wagged a little faster after these evidences of 
growing estrangement. Notices still appeared regu¬ 
larly in the society columns stating that “ Mr. David 
Grant spent the week-end with Mrs. Grant and George 
at their summer home in Minnesota.” But the gossips 
could not be fooled. In David’s new liaison they saw 
evidences of a family failure. 

After George had gone back to military academy in 
the fall, it was plain to the Grants that the sham could 
be continued no longer in Hicktown. They talked it 
over and agreed that Dora should file for a divorce. 
The divorce was granted on the ground of incompati¬ 
bility and Dora returned to Mainton where she might 
be able to see her lover more frequently. 

After the divorce David held his job under protest 
of several members of the board of directors. Under 
this pressure he was forced to resign. He made a 
statement to the local daily paper to the effect that he 
had had this change under consideration for several 
months. He advised his friends that he had accepted 
an insurance agency and would be pleased to serve 
them in that capacity. 


6o 


The Fate of the Family 


According to the news that comes “ over the grape¬ 
vine” David will probably marry the divorcee. His 
parents, greatly disappointed over the failure of the 
home, have maintained a remarkable composure. They 
visit frequently with Dora and want her to marry the 
man she prefers to their son. 

Here is a family in which neither poverty nor race 
nor class tension is a problem. The family breaks up 
through lack of mutual consideration, self-control and 
a common purpose for something higher than the per¬ 
sonal likes and dislikes of a man and woman. They 
could have been helped if for them victory over pride, 
hyprocrisy and sensuality had been achievable. 

In sexual relationships, the recourse of men to pros¬ 
titutes must be looked upon as the most extreme asser¬ 
tion of individualism. The men who frequent houses 
of ill repute are demanding for themselves a life of 
special privilege in abrogation of one of the great 
agreements of life to which they have been socially 
pledged in loyalty. Here is the point where individu¬ 
alism becomes immoderately, violently antisocial. Back 
in 1911, after a thorough investigation of conditions in 
the city by the Chicago Vice Report, the interpretative 
Social Evil in Chicago was shocked by the results of the 
findings into saying: 

. . . There is only one moral law — it is alike 
for men and women. . . . There is a contract 
called matrimony which is a solemn contract be¬ 
tween those who love. It carries with it the ele- 


6i 


4 

The Self-Centered Mind 

ments of vested rights — even a solemn promise 
before God. . . . Has this contract been kept in¬ 
violate ? If not, why not ? 

To one who hears the ghastly life story of fallen 
women, it is ever the same — the story of treachery, 
seduction and downfall — the flagrant act of man 
— the ruin of a soul by man. 

It is a man and not a woman problem which 
we face today — commercialized by man — sup¬ 
ported by man — the supply of fresh victims fur¬ 
nished by men — men who have lost that fine 
instinct of chivalry and that splendid honor for 
womanhood where the destruction of a woman’s 
soul is abhorrent, and where the defense of a 
woman’s purity is truly the occasion for a valiant 
fight. 


% 


VI 

URBAN AND RURAL ATOMISM 

URBAN LIFE does not socialize; it tends to indi¬ 
vidualize. Hence the modern city is hard on the 
family. In, fact, it is hard on all the human associative 
functions, on politics, education — on all except the 
function for which it was formed: commerce. But it 
seems to be especially hard on the family because the 
relationships within the family are so much more deli¬ 
cately balanced than those within any other associative 
bodies. 

The city is the monumental accomplishment of three 
hundred years of individualistic capitalism. Since 1800 
ever larger cities have arisen, each decade adding to 
the percentage of the population that lives in them. 
Europe has changed from three per cent urban to more 
than fifty per cent. Great industrial nations have seen 
an increasing number of their populations in urban en¬ 
vironments. The United States, which in 1800 had an 
urban population of 210,873 (3.97 per cent of the total 
population), saw that figure grow until one hundred 
years later over thirty million lived in cities — over 40 
per cent of the total. In 1790 there were six cities in 
the country with a population of eight thousand; in 

6z 


Urban and Rural Atomism 63 

1880 the number had increased to 285. In 1920 there 
were 2,254 cities with a population of 2,500 or over, and 
by 1930 there were 2,710 in that bracket. 

There is nothing mysterious about this growth of 
cities. The coming of the great city accompanied the 
rise to power of trader, manufacturer, moneylender and 
professional classes. The city is just one-third of the 
social process. It arises at that point where the re¬ 
sources of great agricultural hinterlands are tied in by 
lines of transportation to industrial centers where the 
raw materials of farm, forest and mine are processed 
in factories. 

City men have managed to reward themselves liber¬ 
ally for the services which they perform. For every 
bushel of wheat which comes to the consumer’s table 
in the shape of loaves of bread, two-thirds of the price 
has been taken by the city men. This is true of four¬ 
teen major products of the farm that go to feed the 
hungry masses in the city. For three hundred years 
city men have found increasingly profitable their role 
of middleman. In 1927 the average farmer in the milk 
shed of Chicago, for the labor of his whole family and 
an investment on a twelve thousand dollar farm plant, 
received about twenty-seven dollars a week.* The 
member of the milk wagon drivers’ union in the city, 
for working eight hours a day, received fifty dollars 
a week plus commission. A government audit of the 
companies which distributed this milk to the city con- 

* Rural-Urban Relations in Chicago, Deary District Information Serv¬ 
ice, Federal Council of Churches, Vol. VII, no. 44. 


The Fate of the Family 


64 

sumer revealed that during the first three years of the 
depression they made a 25 per cent return on their in¬ 
vestment. There is nothing mysterious about this ac¬ 
cumulation of population in the cities. 

But this is not the whole story. 

The city is witnessing the biological collapse of the 
family. The divorce figure in the city far exceeds that 
in the country. Chicago has one divorce for every 4.9 
marriages, which is just about twice the rate for down- 
state Illinois. The high rate of divorce in the city corre¬ 
sponds to the fact that the city is a place where social 
organization disintegrates. All social institutions are 
cracking under the stress and strain of urban life. 
Families are disorganized where churches and schools 
and neighborhood life are also disorganized. 

Cities are places of few children. The suburbs of 
Chicago have about half enough children to replace 
their population. In six cities of the United States 
largely of American stock, there were only about 225 
children per 1,000 women in 1930, a deficit of about 
36 per cent below the number needed to maintain popu¬ 
lation permanently stationary without accessions from 
outside. In all the large cities (those over 100,000 popu¬ 
lation) taken as a whole, the deficit was about 22 per 
cent and in the smaller cities of 2,500 to 100,000 popu¬ 
lation the deficit was about 8 per cent. In the rural 
non-farm population, on the other hand — that is, peo¬ 
ple living in places of less than 2,500 population and in 
the open country but not on farms — there was a sur¬ 
plus of children of about 30 per cent, and in the rural 


Urban and Rural Atomism 65 

farm population the surplus was nearly 50 per cent. 
Urban deficit was slightly exceeded by rural surplus in 
1930 — that is? there were enough children in the na¬ 
tion to cause a very slow increase of population without 
immigration from abroad. (For statistics, see Depart¬ 
ment of Agriculture bulletin, Population Trends and 
National Welfare, 1934.) 

The low birth rate in the city seems to be due to the 
fact that people are willing to sacrifice the bearing of 
children to social pleasure. Moreover, children are ex¬ 
pensive in the city, and city pavements are hazardous 
for them. Above all else, the atmosphere of the city 
and the factory is not conducive to healthy family life. 
It would seem that we must discover some way of 
distributing our population in the more open spaces 
of the country if they are to bear a vigorous and nu¬ 
merous human stock. A civilization which builds 
great cities will have to face the fact that thus far 
cities have not yet performed the most essential func¬ 
tion in national life — namely, an adequate reproduc¬ 
tion of the national stock. 

Unemployment — voluntary or enforced — in the 
city, and poverty on the farm due to over-exploitation 
of the farmer by the city middlemen, are great indi¬ 
vidualizes. Both mean for the individual ostracism 
from the normal social life of the community. On the 
farm, poverty may be seen as a form of unemployment, 
representing as it does in most cases waste of time and 
energy in terms of inadequate returns. Erskine Cald¬ 
well’s Tobacco Road is overdrawn, it is repulsive; but 


66 


The Fate of the Family 


to a great extent it is deplorably true. The following 
picture of the sharecropper’s family published in The 
Advance, December, 1935, shows family life reduced 
to using all energy for the purpose of making a bare 
living. There is neither the time nor the means for 
building up meaningful social relationships: 

The family is composed of Mr. and Mrs. Hart 
and seven children, four boys and three girls be¬ 
tween the ages of twenty-two and nine. Mr. Hart 
rents a farm “ on halves ” from Mr. Reed, who 
furnishes a house, a garden plot, wood for the 
cutting, two mules, and half the fertilizer. The 
government allows this farm 1,100 pounds of lint 
cotton and eight acres of cotton land. This large 
allotment is made because it is a two-mule farm, 
as both Mr. Hart and the nineteen-year-old boy 
can plow. The oldest son is married and lives 
away from home. In addition to the cotton acre¬ 
age, Mr. Hart gets nine acres which he puts in 
corn and cane, and four acres of pasture. There 
are also thirteen acres in woodland, about one for 
garden and potatoes, and some waste land. 

The house contains three rooms. Mr. and Mrs. 
Hart and the two older boys sleep in the front 
room; the three girls and the youngest boy in the 
second room. The house is rickety, unplastered 
and unprotected, and they all suffer from the cold 
in the winter. The roof leaks, so that the beds are 
often wet. There are plank shutters rather than 


Urban and Rural Atomism 67 

glass in the windows and the family sits in dark¬ 
ness all winter, or leaves the door open and “ tries 
to heat all out of doors.” The fireplace in the front 
room can hardly warm eight people, and the cook- 
stove in the kitchen isn’t much good. There is 
not a cupboard or closet in the house. 

The Harts have few clothes except the insuffi¬ 
cient ones on their backs. All go barefoot all sum¬ 
mer. The older girls are ashamed of their ap¬ 
pearance, and run to hide if they hear anyone 
coming, but Mrs. Hart’s feet are so swollen that 
she no longer cares. The school is more than two 
miles away, and the children have to walk in all 
kinds of weather, when they go at all. They have 
never gone regularly, being sick a good deal, and 
they can’t start in on the first of September, hav¬ 
ing to stay home to pick cotton. 

We have recently witnessed the disintegration of 
family life under widespread unemployment. Hear¬ 
ings held among the unemployed in Chicago brought 
forth abundant testimony to the relationship of the 
two. Day after day people came in and told the effects 
of unemployment upon their family life. There was 
stealing of food, fuel and various kinds of merchan¬ 
dise, the breaking open of padlocked gas and electric 
light outlets, the use of every variety of deception to 
obtain more adequate aid from charitable agencies. 
People who would have shunned such activity a few 
years ago now entered into it without hesitation. I 


68 


The Fate of the Family 


quote the following brief statements, every one of 
which reflects the disorganization which depression 
brings on: 

[By a woman] If I could only have just one meal 
that my husband has bought, the food for it would 
taste so much better. 

# # # 

I was brought up with the understanding that 
honesty was the best policy. I have existed, for 
the past several months, under a condition where 
if I were honest, it would not be a virtue but a 
deliberate sin, inasmuch as it would deprive my 
children of the necessary food. 

# # # 

The other day my gas was shut off. I went to 
work and shut the meter off and plugged in and 
got gas. I have stolen coal. You may wonder 
how that has affected my mind. A year or two ago 
if I had seen somebody holding up somebody else 
I might have risked my life to stop it. Today I 
would say, “ I hope he has a big fat politician by 

the neck and kills him, or a big fat banker.” 

# # # 

I told my wife I would get the money [for rent] 
one day when I was a little emotional and hysteri¬ 
cal; in other words, I told her that I knew where 


Urban and Rural Atomism 69 

there was a gun. She said, “ Don’t be crazy,” that 
people who killed themselves had not gotten any¬ 
where. I said that I was not going to kill my¬ 
self, that I was going out and get some money for 
the rent. I have done everything possible to main¬ 
tain my credit and live like a man and cannot do 
it. Then I have to do something else. 

# # # 

I moved four places. The charities paid one 
month’s rent and said, “ You stay here a while.” 
I stayed there for two months and then got put 
out. I got shipped to another place. This place 
they won’t put me out. Let them try. I’ve made 
up my mind. I moved four places already and I 
won’t move again. If I have to go out and rob, 
I am going to do it. I didn’t have anything to 
eat this morning. I went to the National Tea and 
took a loaf of bread, went to another grocery store 
and got a jar of jam and that is what I had for 
breakfast this morning. I am not ashamed to say 
it. As long as I have to have something to eat I 
will get it if I have to rob. 

# # # 

[By a minister] I might say that some of the 
men have told me frankly that they were stealing 
coal. I have not the heart to rebuke them or pass 
any moral judgment on them. 


70 


The Fate of the Family 


At the other end of the social scale we may read 
the sensational news of the society columns which in¬ 
dicates that another type of unemployment — volun¬ 
tary leisure of social parasites — leaves the family with¬ 
out the moral fiber necessary to its survival. 


vn 


THE SURRENDER OF ROMANCE 

CRITICS OF the bourgeois marriage often refer to it 
as marriage built around property. A. W. Calhoun’s 
Social History of the American Family back in 1917 
pointed out that much of the sanctity of the family 
now rests on a regard for property inherited through 
family channels which necessitates that these channels 
be kept continuous and free from confusion. 

There is much evidence for the extreme view that 
marriage in the West operates under the law of eco¬ 
nomic determinism, and for the moderate view that the 
romantic marriage is modified in all its behavior by 
economic conditions; but there is still more evidence 
for the position that romantic love rises above economic 
considerations. 

The early development of family life in the United 
States was linked to the development of a pioneer coun¬ 
try. The fact that there were no great fortunes in 
itself leveled the barriers of caste and class and made 
democratic choice possible. Transportation was lim¬ 
ited, which meant that marriage took place inside sec¬ 
tional lines — but not necessarily within class lines. 
The economic motive was often clearly present, how- 
71 


72 


The Fate of the Family 


ever, in that young romantics often had an eye for 
economic ability to create the fortunes yet to be made. 
The classic statement of this attitude appeared in 
Horace Bushnell’s Age of Homespun, an address given 
at a centennial celebration in Litchfield, Connecticut, 
in 1851. Here we have romance conditioned by con¬ 
sideration of economic ability and finally succumbing 
to it as a dominant motive when fortunes have ac¬ 
cumulated: 

Descending from the topic of society in general 
to one more delicate, that of marriage and the ten¬ 
der passion and the domestic felicities of the home- 
spun age, the main distinction here to be noted 
is that marriages were commonly contracted at a 
much earlier period in life than now. Not be¬ 
cause the habit of the time was more romantic or 
less prudential, but because a principle more primi¬ 
tive and closer to the beautiful simplicity of nature 
was yet in vogue, viz. that women are given by the 
Almighty, not so much to help their husbands 
spend a living as to help them get one. Accord¬ 
ingly, the ministers were always very emphatic, as 
I remember, in their marriage ceremonies, on the 
ancient idea that the woman was given to the man 
to be a helpmeet for him. . . . What more beauti¬ 
ful embodiment is there on this earth of true senti¬ 
ment than the young wife who has given herself 
to a man in his weakness to make him strong; to 
enter into the hard battle of his life and bear the 


The Surrender of Romance 73 

brunt of it with him; to go down with him in 
disaster if he fails and cling to him for what he 
is; to rise with him, if he rises, and share a two¬ 
fold joy with him in the competence achieved; 
remembering, both of them, how it grew, by little 
and little, and by what methods of frugal industry 
it was nourished; having it also, not as his, but 
theirs, the reward of their common perseverance, 
and the token of their consolidated love. And if 
this be the most heroic sentiment in the woman, 
it certainly was no fault in the man of homespun 
to look for it. 

This mingling of romance and economic ability in 
many cases was as wholesome as the social life of which 
it was a part. 

But this regard for the economic often moved on to 
something less lovely. An illustrative statement of this 
latter situation can be found in Elizabeth Drexel Lehr’s 
King Lehr and the Gilded Age (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 
3:935), a book which for a long time to come will fur¬ 
nish evidence for those who argue that bourgeois mar¬ 
riage is a marriage for property. 

When, about twenty-five years ago, Harry Lehr, then 
the most popular bachelor in New York, became en¬ 
gaged to Elizabeth Drexel, he was not averse to telling 
her that he was poor and that he expected her riches 
to ease this condition. Liking him all the better for 
his frankness, the girl had her lawyers draw up an 
agreement whereby her husband-to-be would receive 


74 The Fate of the Family 

twenty-five thousand dollars a year as pocket money, 
and in which she also undertook to pay all the expenses 
of their life together. 

After dinner, on their wedding eve, Elizabeth wrote 
ecstatically in her diary of Harry’s cleverness, wit and 
beautiful manners. The mood of exhilaration lasted 
until she stood before the altar in a fashionable New 
York church where, with the eyes of society upon her, 
she felt a vague sense of foreboding, and after the cere¬ 
mony she observed, prophetically enough, that the 
bright sky had become overcast. 

At a hotel in Baltimore all the arrangements had been 
completed for their wedding supper which was to 
include Harry’s favorite foods. Beside his plate lay 
a gold and enamel watch. As the bride put the finish¬ 
ing touches to her toilet, her maid entered with the 
astounding news that Mr. Lehr had given orders that 
he was to dine alone. Elizabeth’s feelings can well 
be imagined, but she forced herself to speak lightly 
and gave a headache as the excuse for her husband’s 
extraordinary behavior. 

He came in a few minutes later and asked if she 
had heard of his orders to the servants. The girl, 
frightened by his pale, serious face, her lips too dry 
to speak, could only nod affirmatively. Without fur¬ 
ther preliminaries the man she had married only a few 
hours before proceeded to destroy all her romantic 
dreams of happy marriage, and to kill her faith and 
love with a few caustic, well-chosen words. He in¬ 
formed her that he did not love her and never could 
love her. In public he would treat her with all def- 


The Surrender of Romance 


75 

erence and apparent devotion, but in private he wished 
to see as little of her as possible. 

When, scarcely above a whisper, she asked the nat¬ 
ural question, “ Why did you marry me ? ” he replied, 
with such bitterness in his voice that she recoiled: 

Dear lady, do you really know so little of the 
world that you have never heard of people being 
married for their money, or did you imagine that 
your charms placed you above such a fate ? Since 
you force me to do so I must tell you the unflatter¬ 
ing truth that your money is your only asset in 
my eyes. I married you because the only person on 
earth I love is my mother. I wanted above every¬ 
thing to keep her in comfort. Your father’s for¬ 
tune will enable me to do so. But there is a limit 
to sacrifice. I cannot condemn myself to the mis¬ 
ery of playing the role of adoring lover for the 
rest of my life. 

He went on in a somewhat more amiable tone to 
point out the advantages of her position as his wife, 
which would give her a leading role in society, but, 
when she made no attempt at speech, he continued 
somewhat irritably: 

I suppose I am what the novelists would call an 
adventurer. I am not ashamed of it. I would 
do more than I have done for the sake of my 
mother. If you will try to accustom yourself to 
the position and realize from the start that there 


7 6 


The Fate of the Family 


is no romance and never can be any between us, 
I believe that we shall get along quite well to¬ 
gether. But for God’s sake leave me alone. Do not 
come near me except when we are in public, or you 
will force me to repeat to you the brutal truth 
that you are actually repulsive to me. 

Elizabeth Lehr’s happiness had been swept away by 
that amazing interview, but pride came to her rescue. 
She entered upon her role as Harry Lehr’s gay, social¬ 
ite wife, and her days and nights were crowded with 
engagements. As he had promised, in public Harry 
was the personification of devoted attentiveness, but in 
private he consistently avoided his wife, beyond an oc¬ 
casional grudging phrase as to her ability as a hostess. 
And this state of things continued for the length of 
their married life, about twenty-five years! 

A third stage in this development is that reflected 
in John K. Winkler’s The Du Pont Dynasty (Reynal 
& Hitchcock, 1935). Here the descendants of the 
Du Ponts in America are pictured as an occidental 
“ larger family ” made up of grandfathers, aunts and 
uncles, parents, sons and daughters, who live together 
in contiguous areas and show such a decided tendency 
to marry inside the clan that the clan elders have found 
it necessary to forbid intermarriage between kinship 
groups. This might be called clan individualism. 

The Du Ponts are a great, sprawling family. Yet 
the several hundred individuals making up the 


The Surrender of Romance 77 

clan have held surprisingly close to the manners, 
customs and traditions of their French bourgeois 
origin. They have sunk their transplanted roots in 
one section and one soil, cultivating the same acres 
and inhabiting the same houses generation after 
generation. There are twenty or more Du Pont 
estates within an hour’s ride of Wilmington. . . . 
For a century these people lived so much within 
themselves that, considering the largeness of their 
family, consanguine marriages were the natural 
result. . . . Inbreeding among the Du Ponts has 
brought out both recessive and dominant traits, as 
the biologists term them. There have been er¬ 
ratic, abnormal, insane individuals among the Du 
Ponts, though the percentage has not been higher, 
perhaps, than the statistical average. Colonel 
Henry du Pont, as pater familias, years ago forbade 
further cousin marriages. Pierre in turn has tried 
to enforce the dictum, though he himself married 
a first cousin. 

To this list of illustrations can be added the social 
register built up on property lines, the clubs and 
churches which are so expensive that only the rich can 
join, and the colleges and private schools which are 
attended by people of established income. In view of 
the mass of evidence of this kind, it is not difficult for 
one to conclude that the democratic marriage which 
freed itself from the considerations of caste and class 
laid itself at the feet of the chamber of commerce. 




Part Three 

IMPROVING THE DEMOCRATIC 
FAMILY 















VIII 


THE PROBLEM FACING THE ROMANTIC 
MARRIAGE 

THE ROMANTIC marriage and the democratic fam¬ 
ily form the emotional and ethical core of the Western 
democratic movement. All the families of the world 
are moving in the direction of the romantic marriage. 
This is true of the Orient; it has very largely been ac¬ 
complished in Europe; and in the West there does 
not seem to be any weakening of the conviction that 
young men and women should maintain in their own 
hands the right to make decisions in their intimate love 
affairs. Furthermore, this democratic family is so 
closely intertwined with the political and social or¬ 
ganization of the West that it constitutes a fixed point 
from which the social and economic structure can be 
surveyed. Indeed, one may venture the suggestion that 
regard for the democratic family may determine the 
economic structure in the future more than the eco¬ 
nomic structure will determine the nature of the family. 
It is entirely possible that what we finally decide to do 
about property will be determined by our convictions 
about the way we wish to organize in families. 

It is not likely that the world is going to give up the 
emotional and ethical gains which have come with the 

81 


82 


The Fate of the Family 


democratic family. The future of democratic marriage 
is therefore not called in question here. The question 
raised in this chapter pertains to those improvements of 
it which are now being advocated, and with the changes 
which are likely to be made in it as modern democracy 
faces the issues of the future. Briefly stated, the real 
problem is: How can democratic marriage be rescued 
from death at the hands of its co-partners, democratic 
individualism and capitalism, without falling a victim 
to a totalitarian state? 

Fifty years ago the church was facing the crisis cre¬ 
ated by the inroads which the vices of a pioneer society 

— intemperance, prostitution, gambling and ignorance 

— were making on the family. These social scourges 
still exist, and must be fought. The growth of gam¬ 
bling and the probable growth of intemperance may 
once more make these live issues in Western life. But 
these are not the issues of most importance to those 
who are concerned with the fate of the Western family. 

Neither is the problem of making democratic mar¬ 
riage more individualistic the most vital one at the 
present time. It is probably true that democracy has 
not yet done its perfect work inside the family. There 
are many who feel that the democratic principle has 
arrived late in family life, and with the spirit of social 
crusaders they believe that the family needs most of 
all an extension of the democratic spirit. So Judge 
Lindsey comes forward with his book on Companion¬ 
ate Marriage (Boni & Liveright, 1927), in which we 
find the following explanation: 


The Problem Facing the Romantic Marriage 83 

Companionate marriage is legal marriage with 
legalized birth control, and with the right to di¬ 
vorce by mutual consent for childless couples, usu¬ 
ally without payment of alimony. Companionate 
marriage is a program which proposes to legalize, 
stabilize and direct certain of the customs, priv¬ 
ileges and practices of modern marriage, practices 
which are already in widespread use, but which 
have no legal status or direction (Intro., p. 5). 

Divorce would be granted only after a court of do¬ 
mestic relations has failed in a human and scientific 
effort at reconciliation. Alimony would not be that 
arbitrary legal right of the wife, as it is at present in so 
many states, but would be allowed when, in the judg¬ 
ment of the court, circumstances justified it. Educa¬ 
tion by state agencies of youth and married couples in 
the art of love, the laws of sex and life, would be made 
available. Both parties to a physical contract would 
be required to undergo physical examination. Judge 
Lindsey argues for his program: 

Companionate marriage is already an established 
social fact in this country. It is conventionally re¬ 
spectable. Sophisticated people are, without in¬ 
curring social reproach, everywhere practicing 
birth control and are also obtaining collusive di¬ 
vorces outside the law whenever they want it. 
They will continue to practice and no amount of 
prohibition can stop them. My thought is that 


84 The Fate of the Family 

we should put an end to the hypocritical pretense 
under which we profess one thing and do another, 
that the companionate marriage, now largely 
monopolized by educated people who understand 
contraceptive devices, ought to be made legally 
and openly available to all people, particularly to 
the poor and socially unfit who need it most. To 
protest against the colossal phenomenon is like 
trying to stop the tide by scolding it. I suggest 
that if we rationalize this new thing and use it 
intelligently we may be able to derive from it a 
degree of social and spiritual power capable of 
creating for our descendants a better world than 
we have been able to fashion for our own use and 
happiness. This is clearly one more step in em¬ 
phasizing the principle of individual right in the 
organization of the marriage relationship. 

But there are still those who wish to go much further 
than Judge Lindsey in the perfection of the principle 
of individualism as applied to marriage. They feel 
that, though the law allows very great freedom, and 
should allow more in democratizing the modern home, 
marriage itself still operates under a tradition of mys¬ 
tery, of awe, of a certain kind of authoritarianism which 
grows out of ignorance and inability to control the 
situation; therefore, they advocate the removal of all 
mystery, ignorance and what might be called the cas¬ 
ualties of nature in the matter. Only then, they believe, 
will the democratic principle find itself. 

Many hope for much improvement from greater 


The Problem Facing the Romantic Marriage 85 

frankness regarding sex knowledge and sex practices. 
Certain modern psychiatrists maintain that if we could 
teach people that conception is preventable, venereal 
diseases curable, divorces obtainable and God impos¬ 
sible, we could greatly improve the spirit and practice 
of the democratic marriage. In other words, the psy¬ 
chiatrist would improve the family by accentuating or 
placing even more emphasis upon individualism than 
already exists. 

Although I am inclined to agree that marriage still 
operates in a man-dominated world and under too 
much of a sense of mystery and fear, I believe it is use¬ 
less to attempt to improve the democratic family by 
starting from this point of view. Psychiatrists and 
social reformers are scarcely beginning to deal with the 
crucial issues which the democratic family must face 
in the immediate future; they persist in focusing at¬ 
tention on trivial and, to a certain extent, outworn 
phases of the family problem. 

Western democratic marriage faces biological futil¬ 
ity at the hands of capitalism’s most notable achieve¬ 
ment — the modern city — and social disintegration at 
the hands of an individualism which is largely the 
product of modern democracy. The problems of the 
future will be, not how to prevent children from be¬ 
ing born or how to secure a divorce in a church-ridden 
society, but how to build adequate families which will 
produce enough children to continue the career of the 
race, and how to make the family an integral part of 
a great spiritual will to live without subordinating it 
to the state. 




EX 


INSIDE THE FAMILY CIRCLE 

LET US TRY to understand the social nature of the 
family. As far back as the middle of the last century, 
Horace Bushnell pointed out that the family is both 
the agent and the object of salvation. Families are 
societies of mutual dependence which establish roles 
for people in the most sensitive period of their lives. 
How father, mother, brothers and sisters condition one 
another is the crucial issue in family life. The Old 
Testament tells the story of Jacob who, because he 
favored his son Joseph, made the latter conceited and 
his brothers envious: 

Now Jacob loved Joseph more than all of his 
children because he was the son of his old age, and 
he made him a coat of many colors. And when 
his brethren saw diat their father loved him more 
than all his brethren, they hated him and could 
not speak peaceably unto him. And Joseph 
dreamed a dream and he told his brethren and they 
hated him yet the more. And he said unto them, 
“ Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have 
dreamed, for behold, we were binding sheaves in 
86 


Inside the Family Circle 87 

the field and lo, my sheaf rose and also stood up¬ 
right and behold your sheaves stood round about 
and made obeisance to my sheaf.” And his breth¬ 
ren said to him “ Shalt thou indeed reign over us 
or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us ? ” 
And they hated him yet the more for his dreams 
and for his words. And he dreamed yet another 
dream and told his brethren and said, “ Behold I 
have dreamed a dream more and behold the sun 
and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance 
to me.” And he told it to his father and to his 
brethren and his father rebuked him and said, 
“ Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed 
come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth ? ” 
And his brethren envied him but his father ob¬ 
served the saying. 

This story of a weak, doting father and the havoc 
he wrought has been repeated with countless variations 
through the ages. When parents play favorites they 
devastate a child’s world. The intensity of the anguish 
which this practice produces in the unfavored bears 
witness to the delicacy of the fabric out of which the 
family is woven. 

A family is a community of mutual dependence in 
matters far more intimately related to the individual 
than are politics and business. When a man and a 
woman join in the relationship of marriage, they 
establish a community about which both are inevitably 
sensitive. After a woman has given her most intimate 


88 


The Fate of the Family 

self to a man, a relationship has been established in 
which each member of this community holds the 
other’s fate in custody, and over each hangs the per¬ 
petual threat of being accounted a failure in the other’s 
eyes. When children come into the picture this com¬ 
munity of mutual dependence is enlarged. A child, 
feeling that he is not a success in the eyes of his parents, 
easily develops an acute sense of inferiority. 

The family, then, is a society of appreciation. It roots 
first of all in the attraction of the sexes for each other. 
The Romeo and Juliet experience should be the basic 
appreciation experience for every family; but it should 
ripen into the larger and more mature appreciation 
which, in a very real sense, makes the family a society 
in which people redeem one another through apprecia¬ 
tion and devotion. Just as it is possible for one to de¬ 
stroy another’s life through refusing to give a loving 
self-revelation which will evoke an answering response, 
so it is possible, by a love which is more than temporary 
passion, for husband and wife and parents and children 
to lift each other up to an exaltation which is truly 
redemptive. Such was the secret of the relationship of 
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Such is the 
story of redemptive love which St. Paul applauds in 
the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. 

A family is a society with habits and ritual. It is 
interwoven with other agencies, as the school, church 
and the economic order. The story of the Puritan 
family, given by Professor George H. Palmer of Har¬ 
vard University in an article in the Atlantic Monthly, 


Inside the Family Circle 


89 

1921, offers an illustration which may seem extreme, 
but is eloquent of the part ritual and symbolism may 
play, and often still do play in family life: 

My father was a Boston merchant who had come 
from the country and by diligence had climbed 
to a competence. In our home all was plain and 
solid. There was no luxury. Expenditure was 
carefully studied, and waste incessantly fought. 
But we had all that was needed for comfort and 
dignity, and on all that we possessed and did re¬ 
ligion set its mark. To exhibit that ever-present 
influence, I trace the course of a single day. 

On rising I read a chapter of the Bible and had 
a prayer by myself. Then to breakfast, where each 
of the family repeated a verse of scripture, my 
father afterward asking a blessing on the meal. 
No meal was taken without this benediction. 
When breakfast was ended, the servants were sum¬ 
moned to family prayers, which ended with the 
. Lord’s Prayer, repeated together. 

Then we children were off to school, which was 
opened with Bible reading and prayer. Of school 
there were two sessions, one in the morning and 
one in the afternoon, so that our principal play 
time was between four thirty and six o’clock, with 
study around the family table after supper. Later 
in the evening when the servants’ work was done, 
they joined us once more at family prayers; after 
which we children kissed each member of the 


90 


The Fate of the Family 


family and departed to bed, always however, be¬ 
fore undressing, reading a chapter of the Bible 
by ourselves and offering an accompanying prayer. 
Each day, therefore, I had six seasons of Bible- 
reading and prayer — two in the family, two by 
myself, and two at school; and this in addition to 
the threefold blessing of the food. No part of 
the day was without consecration. The secular 
and the sacred were completely intertwined. 

Permeated thus as was every day with divine 
suggestion, it may be said that on Sunday our very 
conversation was in the heavens. On that day 
the labor of the servants was lightened, so that 
they, too, might rest and attend church. Many 
household cares were then thrown upon us chil¬ 
dren, and it was arranged that there should be 
little cooking. But while play and labor ceased 
and solemnity reigned, it was an approved and 
exalting solemnity; for then occurred two preach¬ 
ing services and a session of Sunday school. 

To me the day was one of special happiness, be¬ 
cause my father was then at home and during al¬ 
most every hour of the day he was his children’s 
companion. We gathered about him for cheer¬ 
ful talk after breakfast and after the noon dinner 
he usually read to us from the Pilgrim's Progress, 
or some other benign and attractive book. After 
supper the whole family assembled in the parlor 
and when each one present had repeated a hymn 
or poem, we had an hour of music — solos on the 


Inside the Family Circle 91 

piano by the girls and familiar hymns sung with¬ 
out book by the entire company. 

Toward the end of the evening my father was 
apt to put his arm around one of the children and 
draw him into the library for a half-hour’s private 
talk. Blessed and influential sessions these, serv¬ 
ing the purpose of the Roman confessional! As 
frank as that and as peace-bringing, but freed from 
its formality, with no other authority recognized 
than a common allegiance to a Heavenly Father, 
the independence of us little ones guarded by the 
abounding wisdom, tenderness, trust and even play¬ 
fulness of our adored companion. 

Such unceasing presence in the Puritan home 
of the religious motive might easily have become 
unwholesome and enfeebling, had it not been at¬ 
tended by several other powerful influences which 
diversified it and enriched the nature to which 
religion gave stability. As these supporting in¬ 
terests are generally overlooked by those who cen¬ 
sure the Puritan home, I name a few of them. 

To the family tie the Puritans gave great promi¬ 
nence. Marriage was a sacrament, and the family 
a divine institution, where each member was 
charged with the well-being of all. In my own 
family there was little authoritative restriction. 
With father and mother we children were on 
terms of tender and reverential intimacy. They 
joined us in our games, were sharers in our studies, 
friendships and aspirations. To them we expressed 


92 


The Fate of the Family 


freely our half-formed thoughts. If one of them 
took a journey, one of us was pretty sure to be a 
companion. 

In a family where there were few servants, each 
of us took part in household duties. There were 
rooms to be set in order, wood to be split, errands 
to be run. The older children must wait on the 
younger. In this way all were drawn together by 
common cares. Brothers and sisters became close 
friends. Affection was deep and openly expressed. 
With no fear of sentimentality we kissed one an¬ 
other often, always on going to bed, on rising and 
usually when leaving the house for even a few 
hours. We were generous with our small pocket 
monies and wept when the ending vacation carried 
away to boarding-school a member of our group. 
The Puritan home cannot be rightly estimated 
without noting the tenacity of family affection, 
which its devout atmosphere directly contributed 
to induce. 

The point I have endeavored to stress in this section 
is that the relationships between members of a family 
are very delicately adjusted based as they are on mutual 
dependence. In any attempt to change family life, 
these peculiar relationships must be carefully con¬ 
sidered. 


X 


SOCIALIZING THE FAMILY 

THE POINT of view of this book can be stated in a 
few words: people who are entering into the family re¬ 
lationship should realize that they are building little 
societies within a democratic world which itself de¬ 
pends on a collective conviction. This point of view 
stands by contrast against the creation of families by 
passion, by parental decision or by divine fiat; let us 
call it creation of families by conviction . 

In a discussion of Oriental families, I described what 
might be called families by paternalistic decision. 
Those entering into the family were relieved of the 
necessity of holding any convictions beyond those 
handed to them by tradition and the decisions of the 
elders. 

The commonly accepted Catholic and Protestant 
marriage ceremony has a phrase, “ Whom God hath 
joined toegther. . . .” Were we to take that phrase 
literally, as many have done, we would have a clear 
case of what might be called families by divine fiat. 
God, in this case, has taken the place of the paternal¬ 
istic matchmaker in the Oriental marriage. At the 
opposite extreme we have the little better known mar¬ 
riage by passion and the drift of circumstances. 

93 


94 


The Fate of the Family 


Families by conviction are those made by people who 
enter into the relationship through an understanding 
of both its personal and social significance, not through 
compulsion of custom or of paternalism, human or 
divine. I do not believe that the matter with which I 
am here concerned is primarily the business of the doc¬ 
tor or psychoanalyst, as many maintain it is. These pro¬ 
fessionals seldom come in contact with the great mass 
of families, and then only when families are in trouble. 
The building of the conviction which must lie at the 
base of family life must be the work of those who es¬ 
tablish social ideals and attitudes — namely, the clergy, 
the educators and others who deal with the mass of 
human beings who are looking forward toward the 
major activities of life. People who establish families 
by conviction will not only have a conviction about the 
birth of children, but also about the relationships of 
husband, wife and children to one another and their 
collective relationships to their family and the world 
outside — a world which is made up of those groups 
and institutions which serve the total human welfare. 

Family life is a series of achieved functional rela¬ 
tionships between husband and wife, parent and child, 
brother and sister. We should recognize first of all 
that the husband-wife relationship displaces a highly 
competitive relationship between the sexes. Between 
this competitive relationship and marriage, there is a 
period of semi-competition known as the engagement 
period, when the mutual claim of two people upon 
each other is neither so binding as marriage nor so 


Socializing the Family 


95 

free as the period of sex competition. It is a period 
when either party to an engagement should have the 
right to withdraw without dishonor. A clearer rec¬ 
ognition of this right might prevent many an unsatis¬ 
factory marriage. But marriage itself belongs to an¬ 
other world than that of sex competition. The attempt 
to introduce competition into this new world rightly 
opens one to the charge of committing a social mis¬ 
demeanor worthy of public and private punishment. 

The argument for stabilizing the sex relationship on 
a noncompetitive basis must lie in the larger values 
to be sought as two people attempt to establish to¬ 
gether those values which cannot be otherwise achieved. 
They must, with conviction, forego those excitements 
which characterize an earlier period. Mr. .Elton Mayo, 
in Harper s Magazine, March, 1936, wrote an article on 
“ Should Marriage Be Monotonous ? ” His answer is 
in the affirmative; it should be as monotonous as states¬ 
manship, more monotonous than revolution. What he 
has in mind is that the setting up of family life calls 
for the building of a society rather than the romantic 
seeking of excitement. 

A successful family life is a harmony developed out 
of diversity. Not to recognize this fact is to invite 
failure. Husband and wife not only bring to each other 
that unfulfilled destiny of sex for which each alone is 
inadequate, but they probably bring to each other dif¬ 
fering standards of culture, temperament and racial 
habits which constitute in themselves basic possibilities 
for disharmony. In a democratic marriage this achieve- 


The Fate of the Family 


96 

ment of harmony is the result of effort; in other types 
of marriage, if it is attained at all, it is an achievement 
in which there is a strong element of compulsion. 

In the same way the relationship of brothers to 
brothers, sisters to sisters, and brothers and sisters to 
one another is a triumph in social achievement, if it 
succeeds at all. Here is a world which cannot be de¬ 
scribed in terms of one part, nor even of two parts. 
There is a third element which is more than each 
and which all parts enter into together. 

It is from this angle of families by conviction that 
one may best discuss the question of birth control, for 
in this type of family the rearing of children will be an 
adventure into which people will not enter by drift. 
Birth control of some kind is of very long standing in 
the human race. If one looks through the population 
census of India, one finds a larger percentage of males 
than of females. The census authorities have only one 
explanation — infanticide practiced by people who gen¬ 
erally desire to rear more boys than girls. Control of 
the number of children in the Western world is a 
modern development. Birth control information can 
now be had from birth control clinics and many doc¬ 
tors. Although we must recognize that there is a phys¬ 
ical and an ethical danger in the practice, this argu¬ 
ment is nevertheless not final. Interference with the 
processes of nature by mechanical means has gone a 
long way in human society. There was once a time 
when men looked upon drought as a judgment of God 
upon his children; now they build irrigation'ditches and 


Socializing the Family 


97 

interfere with drought — and something happened to 
both theology and ethics when that first took place. 
Most of our modern progress has meant mechanical 
interference with the processes of nature. 

Interference in sex matters has long been practiced. 
There was a time when it was considered dangerous for 
men and women to look upon each other. Purdah is 
a custom largely built upon that theory. Women, 
when they come out into the highways, are completely 
covered from head to foot by a long purdah robe. Only 
two small slits before their eyes make it possible for 
them to see where they are going. Houses are built 
in such a manner that women cannot look out into the 
street, nor can anyone from the street look within. 
Upon the top of the houses is a belt of flat roof where 
women can get sunshine and some exercise, but even 
this is surrounded by latticework. Purdah worked 
splendidly for the seclusion of women until the advent 
of the airplane. It is hard to estimate what the airplane 
will do to the roof gardens of India. 

Based on the fear that the feasting of the eyes will 
lead to some kind of social perversion, the purdah robes 
are mechanical interferences with nature. The ma¬ 
jority of people in the world now have given up the 
purdah system. We are perfectly willing that boys and 
girls should look upon one another, and we permit it 
without fear. 

Birth control, however, is a different type of inter¬ 
vention. The purdah system and similar social de¬ 
vices were formed in the interest of discouraging and 


The Fate of the Family 


98 

limiting sex gratification. Birth control, in addition 
to the very legitimate purpose of preventing too many 
children, has the express purpose of increasing pleasure 
in sex matters. It is here that, for many people, it will 
probably be an invitation to exhaust life in an ex¬ 
pression which has possibilities of bringing on de¬ 
terioration. Count Keyserling calls attention to the 
fact that those countries which have achieved the high¬ 
est in art and religion have also been those which have 
accepted a rather high degree of discipline in matters 
of sex expression. His contention seems valid. 

There is still another perplexing problem we meet 
in the question of birth control. As we have already 
mentioned, the birth rate in most of our cities falls 
from 25 to 30 per cent short of being sufficient to re¬ 
place the population. Birth control may involve the 
limitation of families to such an extent that people of 
ability and intelligence will cease to bear their share of 
the burden of perpetuating the race. 

It is from the angle of families by conviction that we 
may discuss the matter of divorce. Divorce has fre¬ 
quently been assumed a violation of social law or of 
divine fiat. I think it is necessary to lay less emphasis 
upon this assumption and more upon the idea of con¬ 
viction. Families represent one of the great basic agree¬ 
ments of society. Accordingly, if society is not stable 
in this realm it will become chaotic throughout. Dr. 
R. C. Cabot, in his Meaning of Right and Wrong, said 
that every agreement which is a good agreement carries 
with it a principle of revolt. I suppose he means that 


Socializing the Family 


99 


the right to agree carries with it the right to disagree. 
The feeling that people cannot revolt, must not revolt, 
robs the fact that they do not revolt of its ethical 
quality. 

The areas of family disorganization are not those in 
which people are accustomed to make great decisions. 
They are rather those in which people live trivial rather 
than great lives. In Chicago, for instance, the areas of 
highest divorce rate are those where people are failing 
to keep up their relationship to a vast number of or¬ 
ganizations. They are areas where the churches, neigh¬ 
borhoods and even business are disintegrating. 

In a recent study of 466 cases of divorce, the legal 
causes for separation were reported as 95 for adultery, 
139 for cruelty and 231 for desertion. Other causes 
were financial tension, venereal infection, drinking and 
irregular habits. All of these represent, to a large de¬ 
gree, personal failure. The mounting number of di¬ 
vorces in the United States does not reflect so much 
a desire to carry through on a high plane the demo¬ 
cratic principle, as a greater inadequacy on the part of 
people to meet accumulated crises. 

What would be an ethical attitude toward divorce? 

There was a time when the only cause recognized as 
valid for divorce was adultery — an attitude based on 
a very inadequate analysis of what constitutes a success¬ 
ful family. Are we to assume that all who do not com¬ 
mit adultery are therefore adequately meeting the laws 
of good family living? As a matter of fact, I have 
known of a number of cases of adultery in which the 


100 


The Fate of the Family 


individuals involved gained from the experience a new 
insight into family life. A number of years ago, among 
my church members were a young man and his wife, 
both working on salaries. They hoped that by fore¬ 
going the rearing of children and by working they 
could gather together enough money to buy a small 
business. The young man, however, was temporarily 
swept off his feet by another woman associated with 
him in the same business, and went off with her. His 
wife came to me for advice. She said her friends were 
urging her to get a divorce. I did not think that she 
should. In about three weeks her husband returned, 
a very penitent individual. He and his wife both care¬ 
fully re-examined the question of the purpose of mar¬ 
riage and have since led a satisfactory, happy life to¬ 
gether. 

In some cases divorce is necessary as a therapeutic 
measure. Incompatible members of a family may, 
through constant disagreements, become involved in 
serious mental maladjustments. Again, divorce may 
save the moral standards of a family. A number of 
years ago I knew a woman who was carrying the finan¬ 
cial burden of a family of four children and a husband 
who was a parasitic member of the family. Often he 
stole the money which his wife had accumulated to pay 
for the children’s education in order to satisfy his crav¬ 
ing for drugs. Finally the woman went to the divorce 
court, although it seemed to her a terrible thing to do. 
But I am satisfied that she saved the moral standards 
of her family by so doing. 


Socializing the Family ioi 

Divorce, I have said, is the principle of revolt in fam¬ 
ily life and, like the principle of revolution in the state, 
it should be exercised in loyalty to the family. When 
people seek a divorce it should be in the interests of 
greater loyalty to the family institutions and the family 
idea, not in the interests of satisfying unbridled desires 
or injured tempers. 

The statement, “ Whom God hath joined together, 
let no man put asunder,” is interpreted by many as a 
perpetual and solemn injunction against all severing 
of the family tie. But let us examine it. If God’s will 
is merely the principle of custom-bound tradition, then 
the statement means one thing. If, however, God’s 
will is a living will which seeks the highest good, then 
it is not reflected in the continuation of a union from 
which all true meaning has fled. And this seems to 
me the true interpretation of this question of the right 
to divorce. That right ought to be exercised only in 
the interest of that living will of God which could 
only be thwarted through the continuation of a union 
which has lost its meaning and become something evil. 

A successful family life is also an achievement be¬ 
tween parent and child. Where marriage is a creating 
of harmony out of diversity, education is a creating of 
independence out of dependence. The helpless infant 
must become the self-governing man. How depend¬ 
ent the child is we are today just beginning to learn. 
From his parents he takes over not merely physical 
structure but also a mental structure organized around 
primary loyalties. The father, the mother, the early 


102 


The Fate of the Family 


guide stand to the small child, in a way and to a degree 
which is never repeated in the course of his develop¬ 
ment, for that in the universe upon which he is de¬ 
pendent for support and affection. The impress of 
their influence therefore goes with him throughout his 
life and implants in him ideals and standards from 
which there is no escape except through growth into 
a larger loyalty and a more comprehensive under¬ 
standing. 

It may be said that the entire social structure, in¬ 
ternalized in the form of conscience, is built upon a 
principle which forbids the disregard or evasion of a pri¬ 
mary loyalty but which does permit that primary loy¬ 
alty to be incorporated into one more comprehensive. 
To bring about this incorporation and to enable the 
growing individual to transcend the loyalties and stand¬ 
ards represented by his early training, is, then, the task 
of education. In the carrying out of that task there 
are, of course, many difficulties and dangers, and it is 
seldom perfectly achieved. The parents may be over- 
indulgent and the child in consequence may grow up 
to be dependent or undisciplined. They may be over- 
severe, relying upon fear to secure obedience. In that 
case one of two things is likely to result. The conscience 
may grow harsh and rigid, causing the individual to 
become a prey to all sorts of fears and conflicts, or 
else to resort to protective devices and subterfuges in 
order to live at peace with the tyrant within. On 
the other hand, he may rebel and choose the career 
of a delinquent. He may shift his loyalties and seek 


Socializing the Family 103 

social validation in a group of his own kind. But no 
individual is likely to remain satisfied with a loyalty 
which is for him a lesser one, and the protective devices 
and subterfuges which block growth are seldom effec¬ 
tive. Inner unrest and social maladjustment invariably 
result. 

It is imperative that each individual’s development 
from small to great loyalties take a social form. Sev¬ 
eral years ago, on a trip into the northwest, I under¬ 
took to discover the rootage of the farmer-labor radi¬ 
calism in that section of the country. In response to 
an inquiry, I was directed to the home of William 
Bosch, who lived on a farm near Atwater, Minnesota. 
There I found a man and his wife, both over ninety 
years of age. They had seven sons and seven daugh¬ 
ters, who were married and living on adjoining farms. 
With their various connections they constituted an ag¬ 
gregation of about seventy people. Two of the sons 
were active in political work and the rest formed a 
friendly nucleus of supporters. They even maintained 
a religious fellowship made up largely of their own 
family group and friendly neighbors who wished to 
meet with them. 

The story goes that in the early ’eighties, William 
Bosch was a member of a group of about three hun¬ 
dred Dutchmen who settled in a colony in southern 
Minnesota. Most of them became conservative Repub¬ 
licans, but not William Bosch. He had read John 
Ruskin and radical literature. When Populism swept 
the state he alone of all the colony became an ardent 


104 The Fate of the Family 

believer in the doctrine and he challenged to debate 
men of other political faith. One day, hearing that 
about two hundred of his fellow Dutchmen were hang¬ 
ing William Jennings Bryan in effigy from the limb of 
a tree, he grabbed his shotgun and started down the 
road. His neighbors fled at his coming, but though he 
was victorious in this incident the other members of 
the colony took up a collection to buy out his land 
holdings and turn his farm over to a less radical mem¬ 
ber. Taking his money, William Bosch moved with 
his family to new land in central Minnesota. Every 
wave of political radicalism which swept Minnesota 
found him a willing listener. In his own words: “ In 
my youth (in Holland) I was fed Calvinism with a 
spoon. I still believe it is good Calvinism to cause 
trouble for the political state. My wife and I have been 
running something of a political incubator. Around 
our table we have discussed every political question 
which is vital to the interests of the American 
farmer.” 

When I use the term “ socializing the American fam¬ 
ily,” I have in mind the relating of the American family 
to the interests of society not through super-directed 
manipulation but by self-directed interest. The demo¬ 
cratic family is not necessarily public-minded; but its 
architecture symbolizes the fact that it is a candidate 
for public-mindedness. The single house looking out 
upon the street symbolizes a commitment to public in¬ 
terest, even if it is not always achieved. It is true that 
there are too many homes which never make the transi- 


Socializing the Family 105 

tion from a petty interest in their own private affairs to 
an interest in the public. 

The Oriental bride and groom to some extent lose 
any tendency to self-interest because they are members 
of a larger family and have a larger loyalty outside of 
themselves. The social-minded self-discipline and regi¬ 
mentation of the larger family make it understood to 
the married couple that they cannot live for their own 
satisfaction. The president of the University of Amoy 
once told me of the larger family group of which he 
was proud to be a member — a group which could 
trace its history to the time of Confucius and which 
had many honorable connections with several ruling 
dynasties. The elders of this family, he said, could take 
over the problems of law and order, perform the func¬ 
tions of a law court and secure law enforcement with 
no dependence at all upon the state. Here was a cer¬ 
tain public-mindedness within the family group. The 
democratic family, however, has turned over most of 
these functions to the community, civic organizations 
and the state. However, there is nothing compulsory 
about this relationship. If the American family pleases 
it can be more selfish and less cognizant of its social 
responsibilities than any other family in existence. In 
fact, I think it would not be unfair to say that many of 
our families are the most selfish in the world. 

Isolation is especially true of families which live the 
anonymous life of the modern city. They have no 
consciousness of neighborhood; civic responsibility has 
been abrogated; politics has become so corrupt that 


io6 The Fate of the Family 

they think it futile to participate in it; they are isolated 
from both voluntary and public institutional life. If 
they were living in the country or in a small town, the 
neighborhood would be real to them and neighborhood 
responsibility would be understood. As it is, isolation 
and petty-mindedness lay hold of them like a disease. 
Even in the training of children there is an absence of 
those home chores which could be the beginning of 
public-mindedness on the part of the boy on the farm. 

Dr. Henry Churchill King, in his Laws of Friendship, 
tells of the way families coddle themselves into selfish¬ 
ness. He quotes from another author as follows: 

The higher moral good of the husband occupies 
most wives comparatively little; and often a man 
who starts with a great many lofty and disinter¬ 
ested aspirations deteriorates, year by year, in a de¬ 
plorable manner under the influence of a suffi¬ 
ciently well-meaning and personally conscientious 
wife. If you ask how can this be, the answer is 
that the wife’s affection being of a poor and short¬ 
sighted kind, she constantly urges her husband to 
think of himself and his own interests rather than 
of the persons and objects for which he was ready 
to sacrifice himself. “ Do not go on that charitable 
errand today: you have caught a cold. It will an¬ 
swer as well tomorrow.” “ Do not invite that dull 
old friend.” “ Do not join that tiresome commit¬ 
tee.” “ Pray take a long holiday.” “ By all means, 
buy yourself a new hunter.” “ Do not refrain from 


Socializing the Family 


107 

confessing your unorthodox opinions.” This kind 
of thing, dropped every day like the lump of sugar 
into the breakfast cup of tea, in the end produces 
a real constitutional change in the man’s mind. 
He begins to think himself, first, somewhat of a 
hero when he goes against such sweet counsel, and 
then a Quixote, and then a fool. And a curious 
reciprocity is also established. The husband can¬ 
not do less than return the wife’s kindness by beg¬ 
ging her not to distress and tire herself by perform¬ 
ing any duty which costs a little self-sacrifice; and 
she again returns the compliment, and so on and 
so on, till they nurse each other into complete 
selfishness. . . . But if, on the other hand, the wife 
from the first cherishes every spark of generous 
feeling or noble and disinterested ambition in her 
husband, and he, in his turn, encourages her in 
every womanly charity and good deed, how they 
will act and react on each other month after month 
and year after year, each growing nobler, and lov¬ 
ing more nobly, and being more worthy to be 
loved, till their sacred and blessed union brings 
them together to the very gates of heaven! That is 
what marriage ought to be, what it is to a few 
choice and most happy couples and what it ought 
to be to all. (p. 24) 

I doubt if we have ever estimated the aptitude and 
the opportunity of the family to develop public-minded 
citizens by discussion of public questions in fireside and 


108 The Fate of the Family 

table groups. Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, founder of Robert 
College, grew up on a farm in Maine. In his book, My 
Life and Times, he gives a picture of the family fire¬ 
side that is a vivid description of the real training school 
which developed the world-minded founder of Robert 
College: 

Our family was a reading family. On winter 
evenings one of us always read aloud, while some 
of the family industries as sewing and knitting 
were going on. There is a bright glow of social 
happiness over those evenings as they recur to me 
in memory. To my brother and myself the family 
training of reading and discussion was of more 
value than the common school. Our mother and 
sisters were authorities that we never questioned. 
Two or three of Scott’s novels were read, Quentin 
Durward the first; but our reading was mainly 
historical and biographical. The Bible was read 
before retiring to rest, and each child had a sys¬ 
tem of reading the Bible through, one chapter 
every day and five every Sunday. Our Sundays 
were sacredly guarded from all unnecessary labor, 
and the reading was in harmony with the sacred¬ 
ness of the day. The Panoplist, and afterward its 
successor, The Missionary Herald, was read aloud, 
and especially every item of missionary news, for 
some of our neighbors did not believe in missions. 
The missions were then so few that a close ac- 


Socializing the Family 


109 


quaintance with them was easily cultivated, and 
we believed in them with all our might. 

The pathetic fact about the picture portrayed for us 
in Cyrus Hamlin’s boyhood home is that, to an alto¬ 
gether too large extent, it has disappeared from Ameri¬ 
can life. 


XI 


MAKING THE NATION SAFE 
FOR THE FAMILY 

THE FAMILY rests on a foundation of sentiment. 
Far be it from me to advocate a return to the age of 
homespun; reconstruction of the pre-capitalistic pe¬ 
riod in America when the economic system did not 
penalize parenthood and when the rearing of families 
was integrated with certain great convictions, is pos¬ 
sible only on paper. Nevertheless, it may be profitable 
to resurrect a picture of that age in order that we may 
discover certain sentiments which ought to be approxi¬ 
mated in the reorganization of society. For this reason 
I have chosen that eloquent and accurate picture of the 
age of homespun created in the address of Horace Bush- 
nell, from which I have already had occasion to quote: 

. . . Here lie [in the country cemetery] the 
sturdy kings of homespun, who climbed among 
these hills, with their axes, to cut away room for 
their cabins and for family prayers, and so for the 
good future to come. Here lie their sons, who fod¬ 
dered their cattle on the snows, and built stone 
fences while the corn was sprouting in the hills, 
no 


Making the Nation Safe for the Family hi 

getting ready, in that way, to send a boy or two to 
college. Here lie . . . the good housewives that 
made coats, every year, like Hannah, for their 
children’s bodies, and lined their memory with 
catechism. Here the millers, that took honest toll 
of the rye; the smiths and coopers, that superin¬ 
tended two hands and got a little revenue of honest 
bread and schooling from their small joint stock 
of two-handed investment. Here the district com¬ 
mittees and school mistresses; the religious soci¬ 
ety founders and church deacons; and, withal, a 
great many sensible, wise-headed men, who read a 
weekly newspaper, loved George Washington and 
their country, and had never a thought of going to 
the General Assembly. These are the men and 
women that made Litchfield County. . . . 

But most of all to be remembered, are those 
friendly circles, gathered so often around the win¬ 
ter’s fire — not the stove, but the fire, the brightly 
blazing, hospitable fire. In the early dusk, the 
home circle is drawn more closely and quietly 
round it; but a good neighbor and his wife drop in 
shortly, from over the way, and the circle begins to 
spread. Next, a few young folk from the other end 
of the village, entering in brisker mood, find as 
many more chairs set in as wedges into the periph¬ 
ery to receive them also. And then a friendly sleigh 
full of old and young, that have come down from 
the hill to spend an hour or two, spread the circle 
again, moving it still farther back from the fire; 


112 


The Fate of the Family 


and the fire blazes just as much higher and more 
brightly, having a new stick added for every guest. 
There is no restraint, certainly no affectation of 
style. They tell stories, they laugh, they sing. 
They are serious and gay by turns, or the young 
folks go on with some play, while the fathers and 
mothers are discussing some hard point of theology 
in the minister’s last sermon; or perhaps the great 
danger coming to sound morals from the multi¬ 
plication of turnpikes and newspapers! Meantime, 
the good housewife brings out her choice stock of 
home-grown exotics, gathered from three realms 
— doughnuts from the pantry, hickory nuts from 
the chamber, and the nicest, smoothest apples from 
the cellar; all of which, including, I suppose I must 
add, the rather unpoetic beverage that gave its acid 
smack to the ancient hospitality, are discussed as 
freely, with no fear of consequences. And then, as 
the tall clock in the corner of the room ticks on 
majestically towards nine, the conversation takes, 
it may be, a little more serious turn, and it is sug¬ 
gested that a very happy evening may fitly be ended 
with a prayer. Whereupon the circle breaks up 
with a reverent, congratulative look on every face, 
which is itself the truest language of a social nature 
blessed in human fellowship. . . . 

But the schools — we must not pass by these, if 
we are to form a truthful and sufficient picture of 
the homespun days. The schoolmaster did not ex¬ 
actly go round the district to fit out the children’s 


Making the Nation Safe for the Family 113 

minds with learning, as the shoemaker often did 
to fit their feet with shoes . . . but, to come as near 
it as possible, he boarded round . . . and the wood 
for the common fire was supplied in a way equally 
primitive, viz: by a contribution of loads from the 
several families, according to their several quanti¬ 
ties of childhood. The children were all clothed 
alike in homespun; and the only signs of aristoc¬ 
racy were that some were clean and some a degree 
less so, some in fine white and striped linen, some 
in brown tow crash; and ... the good fathers of 
some testified the opinion that they had of their 
children by bringing fine round loads of hickory 
wood to warm them, while some others, I regret 
to say, brought only scanty, scraggy, ill-looking 
heaps of green oak, white birch and hemlock. . . . 

Passing from the school to the church, or rather 
I should say, to the meeting-house . . . here, again, 
you meet the picture of a sturdy homespun wor¬ 
ship. Probably it stands on some hill, midway be¬ 
tween three or four valleys, whither the tribes go 
up to worship and, when the snowdrifts are deep¬ 
est, go literally from strength to strength. There 
is no furnace or stove, save the footstoves that are 
filled from the fires of the neighboring houses, and 
brought in partly as a rather formal compliment to 
the delicacy of the tender sex, and sometimes be¬ 
cause they are really wanted. The dress of the as¬ 
sembly is mostly homespun, indicating only slight 
distinctions of quality in the worshipers. They 


The Fate of the Family 


114 

are seated according to age, the old king Lemuels 
and their queens in front, near the pulpit, and the 
younger Lemuels farther back, enclosed in pews, 
sitting back to back, impounded, all, for deep 
thought and spiritual digestion; only the deacons, 
sitting close under the pulpit, by themselves, to 
receive, as their distinctive honor, the more per¬ 
pendicular droppings of the word. Clean around 
the front of the gallery is drawn a single row of 
choir, headed by the key-pipe in the center. The 
pulpit is overhung by an august wooden canopy, 
called a sounding board. . . . 

There is no affectation of seriousness in the as¬ 
sembly, no mannerism of worship; some would 
say too little of the manner of worship. They think 
of nothing, in fact, save what meets their intelli¬ 
gence and enters into them by that method. They 
appear like men who have a digestion for strong 
meat and have no conception that trifles more deli¬ 
cate can be of any account to feed the system. . . . 

The very rehearsal of the characteristics of the pre- 
capitalistic age ought to convince us that any return to 
it is now impossible. But there are certain very evident 
relationships that characterized that period which per¬ 
haps can guide us in planning for a social order which 
will make the nation safe for the family. 

The first notable characteristic of the age of home- 
spun was an interplay between the social and economic 
order and the family standard of values. If we break 


Making the Nation Safe for the Family 115 

open any one of these social orders, we find that deeper 
than the rule of law is control through conceptions of 
what is worthy of supreme devotion. In the age of 
homespun there was a certain coincidence between 
what families considered worth while and what the 
social order considered worth while. This relationship, 
too, must be grasped and firmly held in mind in any 
future reconstruction. The morale of the family can¬ 
not be maintained on the basis of the affection two peo¬ 
ple hold for each other. This seems to me the valid 
criticism which all other types of family economy reg¬ 
ister against the romantic marriage. The larger fami¬ 
lies of the Orient and the convention marriage family 
of Europe both insist that romantic love must be rein¬ 
forced by such sentiments as patriotism and the will¬ 
ingness to sacrifice for a racial or class economy. When 
the great national passion comes to be the making of 
money and not the rearing of strong, adequate families, 
there comes a dualism in the national life which not 
only works to the disadvantage of the family but also 
to the corruption and perversion of the nation. 

Secondly, in the age of homespun there was an inter¬ 
play between valid standards of personal success and 
the social order. The road to heaven and the road to 
hell were evident to all eyes. The age of homespun 
was essentially a society in which people knew and were 
able to form a decent public opinion about one another. 
It was a society in which the virtues and vices inevitably 
worked out in a system of rewards and punishments. 
To realize how thoroughly we have departed from such 


ii 6 The Fate of the Family 

a condition, one needs only to read the sensational 
stories in the morning newspaper. 

To state the issue more positively, we must restore 
the family to a place in the national scheme of values. 
Behind all laws and all social organization is that fire 
of human energy which is the organization of the na¬ 
tional will around that which is most desired. Values 
are related to the past and are tremendously important 
in guiding the experience of the future. 

Some men see a stream in terms of trout pools; oth¬ 
ers, engineers, would see it in terms of potential power; 
still others would see it as site for a factory. Now 
these separate judgments which root in the practical 
experience of men are the stuff out of which the na¬ 
tional will is constructed. Some see the national life 
in terms of factories; some see it in terms of art; some, 
in terms of family life; and some in terms of national 
glory and national power. When these judgments are 
partial or warped, men act badly and nations act badly. 
When these judgments are adequate, men build civi¬ 
lization. We often use the phrase, “ a change of the 
national heart.” By that I think we mean a change in 
the relative standing which these values have for the 
people. If the family seems most important or if busi¬ 
ness seems most important, we have a conflict of values 
between family and business. And a change in the na¬ 
tional heart would be a shift in the relative importance 
of these two great objectives. If the family is to be safe 
in the nation it must be a value which men instinctively 
seek and instinctively reach out to protect. Unless we 


Making the Nation Safe for the Family 117 

deal with the family and its relation to the nation in 
this stage, we cannot possibly deal with it in a later 
stage. 

We have said that the family rests on a foundation 
of sentiment. The family also rests on a social struc¬ 
ture— a structure made up of custom, law, property 
ownership, economic behavior and population distribu¬ 
tion. Unless there is a mutual reinforcement of fam¬ 
ily and social structure, there will be conflict eventuat¬ 
ing in the disorganization of both. Many books could 
be written on the relation of the family to the national 
body of custom; one such book is the Social History of 
the American Family by Calhoun. Other books could 
be written on the relation of the family to law; such a 
book is The Family and the State by Breckenridge. 
Other books could be written on the family and the 
housing situation. 

Similarly, the relation of the family to the economic 
system deserves far more adequate treatment than it 
can have in this chapter. It must be sufficient to point 
out that the family must rest on something more than 
a foundation of sentiment; it must be incorporated into 
the national social structure. 

The American democratic family has not had a body 
of law providing equal rights for husband and wife. 
The background of American law is British common 
law, which is still closely related to the patriarchal 
ideas of feudalism. In the records of the British courts 
there is much debate as to how responsible a man is 
for the behavior of his wife. It was generally under- 


n8 The Fate of the Family 

stood that a man was responsible for the misdeeds of 
his wife, and since he was to be held for her misconduct 
there was a natural assumption that he had the right 
to punish her. This raised the further question as to 
how much he should punish her. Had he the right to 
beat his wife with a stick “ no thicker than his thumb ” ? 
Or should he give her moderate correction ? “ For, as 
he is to answer for her misbehavior the law thought it 
reasonable to trust him with this power of restraining 
her by domestic chastisement in the same manner a 
man is allowed to correct his apprentices or his chil¬ 
dren.” This was characterized as the “ pet monkey ” 
theory. Manifestly, such a dependent creature could 
not inherit property nor participate in public affairs. 
The story of woman’s change of status before the law 
is a long one. It is a gradual achievement accompanied 
by courageous self-sacrifice on the part of self-respecting 
women who, for the sake of public good, have initiated 
and led protest after protest. 

Similar fights have been necessary for the protection 
of children from exploitation by economic agencies 
which have found child labor profitable. Alexander 
Hamilton, the ardent advocate of a privileged status for 
the national industries, sought in factory production a 
great opportunity for employing the labor of women 
and children: 

In consequence of it [the cotton mill], all the 
different processes of spinning cotton are per¬ 
formed by means of machines, which are put in 


Making the Nation Safe for the Family 119 

motion by water and attended chiefly by women 
and children; and by a smaller number of persons, 
in the whole, than are requisite in the ordinary 
mode of spinning. And it is an advantage of great 
moment that the operations of this mill may con¬ 
tinue with convenience during the night as well 
as during the day. . . . 

This is not least valuable of the means by which 
manufacturing institutions contribute to augment 
the general stock of industry and production. In 
places where those institutions prevail, besides the 
persons regularly engaged in them, they afford oc¬ 
casional and extra employment to industrious in¬ 
dividuals and to families, who are willing to devote 
the leisure resulting from the intermissions of their 
ordinary pursuits to collateral labors, as a resource 
for multiplying their acquisitions or their enjoy¬ 
ments. The husbandman himself experiences a 
new source of profit and support from the increased 
industry of his wife and daughters, invited and 
stimulated by the demands of the neighboring 
manufactories. 

Besides this advantage of occasional employment 
to classes having different occupations, there is an¬ 
other, of a nature allied to it, and of a similar tend¬ 
ency. This is the employment of persons who 
would otherwise be idle, and in many cases a bur¬ 
then on the community, either from the bias of 
temper, habit, infirmity of body or some other 
cause, indisposing or disqualifying them from the 


120 The Fate of the Family 

toils of the country. It is worthy of particular re¬ 
mark that, in general, women and children are 
rendered more useful, and the latter more early 
useful, by manufacturing establishments than they 
would otherwise be. Of the number of persons 
employed in the cotton manufactories of Great 
Britain, it is computed that four-sevenths nearly 
are women and children; of whom the greater pro¬ 
portion are children and many of them of a ten¬ 
der age. (Wor\s of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 3, 
p. 207) 

The tempering of this enthusiasm for the work of 
women and children in the factories has been a one 
hundred year task for social workers in America. 

It is not sufficient, however, to seek to alleviate the 
working conditions of women and children in modern 
industry. A more thoroughgoing effort must be made 
to raise the family in the national economic process. 
It has often been assumed that the economic process, 
working in an unhindered or free manner, resolves into 
the good of all and consequently of the family. Un¬ 
fortunately, this is not the case. The genius of indus¬ 
try is not the protection of family values, but the pro¬ 
duction of economic goods. Nor does the distribution 
of these economic goods by the national industrial proc¬ 
ess take account of the needs of the process by which 
the race is reproduced and the cultural values of the 
family maintained. 


XII 


WHEN THE FAMILY MUST FIGHT 
FOR ITS RIGHTS 

THERE ARE times when the family must fight for 
its rights. 

For three hundred years the family has been seeking 
its autonomy as over against the church. It is closely 
related to religion but the church has often tyrannized 
over it. The story of that fight is a long and interesting 
one. It probably has not yet been won by the family 
but enough progress has been made to guarantee its ulti¬ 
mate victory. But there is evidence that the family 
has a new fight on its hands. The state has increasingly 
entered the realm once occupied by the family. The 
social worker and the doctor in the name of the state 
enter the home and assume an authority once held only 
by the father and mother. The Dionne quintuplets, for 
example, have only partially belonged to the mother 
who gave them birth ever since they startled the world 
by their arrival. It is not yet clear how far the state will 
go in the invasion of the family circle. In other coun¬ 
tries this invasion has progressed further than it has in 
the United States. 

If one should draw a line through Europe so that on 
the west side are Denmark and the Scandinavian coun- 


iii 


122 


The Fate of the Family 


tries, then let the line come down along the west side 
of Germany and strike the Mediterranean Sea some¬ 
where near Marseilles — on the west side of the line 
will be those countries which are having experience 
with some kind of democratic collectivism, while on 
the east side will be found those which are experiment¬ 
ing with the totalitarian state. On the east, the state 
increasingly claims the right to take charge of the fam¬ 
ily. It organizes the youth in its own youth groups 
which it trains for the state. It feels free to order an 
increase or decrease in the birth rate. Children are to 
be bred for the state. In at least two of these countries 
those who are leading toward a new social order have 
taken their symbols of national greatness from the state. 
They have used force in bringing about social change. 
The family here exists for a totalitarian national econ¬ 
omy in much the same way that the family in Oriental 
countries exists for a totalitarian racial economy. 

The following quotation is from Under the Swastika, 
by J. B. Holt (University of North Carolina Press, 
1936): 

The building up of the Hitler Youth organiza¬ 
tion has taken place, of course, at the expense of 
all other youth organizations. The attempt has 
been made to “ absorb ” the groups whose break¬ 
ing up would obviously have led to conflicts with 
the churches. In this way 400,000 Catholic and 
700,000 Protestant youth were made members of 
the Hitler Youth by decree and given “ duty ” as 


When the Family Must Fight for Its Rights 123 

Hitler Youth. Boy Scouts, Young Steel Helmets, 
political party youth organizations, and all sec¬ 
tarian and nonsectarian sporting clubs, have been 
appropriated by the Hitler Youth, some of them 
losing their identity completely. 

Aside from the religious question, the family 
circle is endangered, though an agreement was 
made on the first of August of this year that Sat¬ 
urday should be National Youth Day. Sunday 
should be left for the family circle. The schools 
were to have the remaining weekdays. Hitler 
Youth were to be freed from sport and gymnastics 
in connection with the schools after school hours, 
and for them there was to be no Saturday school. 
Those not in the Hitler Youth would continue to 
go to school on Saturdays as customary in Ger¬ 
many. This is a settlement of a situation as un¬ 
comfortable for the youth as for the family, gov¬ 
ernment and churches. 

A German correspondent to the Spectator (June 
29, 1934) pictured aptly the relentless and deter¬ 
mined character of the struggle over the youth’s 
free time and a share in its bringing up. After 
school, sports, Hitler Youth duty, prescribed week¬ 
end trips, on Sunday or on afternoons also, and 
after school, theater or comparable extra-curricular 
activities are deducted from a boy’s waking hours, 
the family and the church are left very little of the 
boy’s time. Hitler Youth maintain that, while 
they should regard the parents and church as hav- 


124 


The Fate of the Family 


ing equal rights with the Hitler Youth, the parents 
are not capable of bringing up young Germans in 
truly National Socialistic spirit. And neither the 
Catholic nor the Protestant church is regarded 
by the Hitler Youth as mature enough in “ new 
thinking ” to train National Socialists. The youth 
regard many parents as still liberalistic or “ even ” 
Marxistic. 

As far as the effect of National Socialist organi¬ 
zation of the German people is concerned, one man 
remarked that he was already “ organized ” eight 
times in the Nazi attempt to reduce the multiple 
duplicating organization of pre-Nazi days. And 
in one family, all of whose members belonged to 
Nazi organizations, the only day on which the 
family came together was at the National Socialist 
Party Day once a year in Nuremberg. The agree¬ 
ment of August first is an attempt to protect the 
family life, which, in spite of the effects of such 
organizations, is one of the recognized aims of 
Hitler, in contrast to the communist philosophy. 
Whether or not conflicting desires cause the op¬ 
posite results is an open question. 

The state is man in his governing capacity, repre¬ 
senting him in his exercise of power. It is concerned 
with law and policing. Idealism in the state is always 
expressed in terms of justice. Men hold a different 
relationship to one another as citizens from that which 
they hold as members of a family. 


When the Family Must Fight for Its Rights 125 

If the genius of the state is imposed on the more deli¬ 
cate relationships of life which are found in the family 
and in religion, violence is done to both. The family 
does not exist to breed people for the state. 

It should be possible for us to work out a democratic 
collectivism which would allow each function in so¬ 
ciety to make its contribution to the whole in some¬ 
thing of a fellowship of functions. When the state 
takes over the function of the family, the final question 
will be whether or not something has been sacrificed 
when the child learns his philosophy of life first from 
officers of the state rather than from the tenderness of 
parenthood. It is a serious question whether the ethics 
of love would disappear from society altogether were 
they not first experienced inside the family. 

Orthodox socialism has a legitimate case against the 
family. 

Although the family has a defensible history as the 
organizer and holder of property rights in a primitive 
society and although there was a legitimate alliance 
between the family and the homestead in pioneer days, 
the family as the agent for the holding and transfer of 
property by inheritance is an anachronism which mod¬ 
ern society cannot long endure. The mere fact of some¬ 
one’s inheriting, by the accident of birth, one hundred 
million dollars is no guarantee of successful steward¬ 
ship of the estate. This is an imposition of the genius 
of the family upon the economic order which will prob¬ 
ably not survive the critical thinking of this generation. 

But on the other hand the family has a case against 


126 


The Fate of the Family 


the orthodox socialist. The strict doctrine of economic 
determinism is in conflict with the claims of biological 
determinism. The family has been modified by eco¬ 
nomic conditions but it has remained true to a genius 
of its own; it is still a family. A tree may, for a thou¬ 
sand years, stand by the side of the road and bear in 
its body the record of all the droughts, the energies of 
the soil and the disfigurements of passing civilizations, 
but it is still a tree. Likewise the family has stood by 
the side of the human road since the dawn of history; 
it bears in its structure the marks of the nomadic, the 
agricultural, the machine age, and it will reflect what¬ 
ever economic structure is ahead of us, but it has, and 
it is safe to assume that it will have, a genius all its own. 
It has survived many economic orders and it will sur¬ 
vive many more. It has more justification to talk about 
the transitory nature of the economic order than the 
economic minded have to talk about the passing of the 
family. 

Again, when one reads the apologists for the family 
in the modern socialist state he is impressed with the 
fact that they do not know what to do with it. The 
Webbs write a two-volume history of Soviet Russia and 
do not mention the family to the extent that the word 
gets into the index. When we read the treatment of the 
family by other writers on Soviet Russia we are im¬ 
pressed that the story they tell is the story of the free¬ 
ing of the family from the church and the freeing of 
the members of the family from one another — a rec¬ 
ord which has been going on in capitalistic democracy 


When the Family Must Fight for Its Rights 127 

for a century. Summing up their story they tell us of 
a period of reckless freedom following the revolution 
and a final settling down for some unmentioned reason 
to a present belief in monogamy. In other words, so¬ 
cialism seems not to have carried the family as far as 
democracy has; it has made an attempt to free the fam¬ 
ily from the church but because of its doctrine of eco¬ 
nomic determinism it has given the family no firm 
ground on which to stand. It has helped free woman 
from the tyranny of man and children from the tyranny 
of the parents, but has not so far given us what social¬ 
ism ought to give us — a true doctrine of human asso¬ 
ciation inside the family and a theory of the integra¬ 
tion of the family with the other free institutions of 
society. 

There is a third very practical difficulty which the 
socialists will have to face. It is a difficulty which can 
be, but has not been, overcome. Historically, socialism 
as a movement arose among the urban proletariat and 
all too much has been a movement by and for the urban 
proletariat. Its program for the rural classes has often 
been shortsighted in the extreme. So far neither in 
Soviet Russia nor in the capitalistic countries have the 
urban birth rates been sufficient to supply a population. 
Before the family is safe in the hands of the urban pro¬ 
letariat the socialist will have to do a better job of think¬ 
ing for those populations which are the population 
seedbeds of the nation. That this will be done by any 
urban proletariat dictatorships is not likely. 








Part Four 


THE CHURCH AND THE FAMILY 








XIII 


WHEN PEOPLE MEET CRISES 

HERETOFORE I have taken no account of a factor 
in marriage that I am sure the reader has thought of 
— how different kinds of people meet the crises of fam¬ 
ily life. There is a personal disintegration which de¬ 
stroys family life, and a personal integration which 
lifts family life to a higher plane. There are institutions 
in the community which promote mental health, and 
there are those which tend to influence the individual 
toward mental disease. If we can help people meet 
their crises more adequately, fewer homes will break 
under strain, and if we know how to organize the re¬ 
sources of mental health and make them more avail¬ 
able to people, we can lift not only the individuals but 
families to the highroad of success. 

Every vocation has its own type of crisis, its own va¬ 
riety of strain. The family is no exception. Some 
time ago I asked a doctor to tell me of the strains he 
encountered in his vocation. He said there was first 
of all the long preparation — four years of college, three 
of medical college, an interneship, and then the long 
wait for patients. Then there was the strain of taking 
responsibility for people in their great decisions, the 

131 


The Fate of the Family 


132 

strain on a man’s sympathy as he sees people undergo 
suffering. After a doctor has built up his practice, he 
endures the strain of seeing better and younger men 
taking his patients away from him. Finally, the doc¬ 
tor’s time is never his own, so that he never knows when 
he will have to leave his family appointments to look 
after the health of other people. 

I had a similar talk with a prominent newspaper 
man. He mentioned the strain of having to meet the 
deadlines of the many editions of the contemporary 
newspaper; the strain of conflict in having his pride 
injured when he received a smaller assignment than 
he thought he was entitled to; the constant temptation 
to be cynical about all of life because he saw so much 
of the folly and tragedy in it. 

Family life, which we might think of as a haven 
from such strains as these, has its own, even severer 
ones. There is, first of all, the strain between men and 
women. Men and women are often entirely unac¬ 
quainted with one another’s habits. Sometimes the 
man was reared on the farm and the woman in the city. 
They have different ways of life, and each must adjust 
to the other. With the birth of the first child, entirely 
new feelings are released and husband and wife must 
make a new series of adjustments. After the family 
begins to grow up parents have a sense of confidence, 
but when children enter the public school further prob¬ 
lems arise. The parents must see, first, that the chil¬ 
dren learn the lesson of association with others; and 
second, that school discipline is just and teacher guid- 


When People Meet Crises 133 

ance friendly and wise. When the children, now young 
men and women, go to college, the parents face the 
problem of growing mentally with them and adjust¬ 
ing to their new social life. And finally, there is the 
great social and psychological adjustment that must be 
made to the young man’s or woman’s marriage. In 
short, family life is a perpetual source of strain, and 
those who do not understand this fact fail to under¬ 
stand that which makes family life both exciting and 
exacting. 

People meet these strains in various ways according 
to their differing capacities. Here are the stories of 
two young men whom I have known. They represent 
diametrically opposite ways of triumphing over the 
hazards of life. The first, when a student in a school 
in Utah, went to the mountains during his summer 
vacation to earn money to carry on his schooling. One 
day in an accidental explosion of dynamite, he lost both 
hands and was permanently blinded. Certainly his 
handicaps from that time on were real and everything 
pointed in the direction of a life of complete depend¬ 
ency. After the first terrible suffering endured during 
his hospitalization, he faced a struggle with his own 
family who were insisting that he take a place of de¬ 
pendency within the family, and possibly beg on the 
streets for a living. He left home saying he would 
not return until he was independent. For a time he 
became a drug addict, but later shut himself up in a 
hospital and, with the aid of a physician, made a suc¬ 
cessful fight against the habit. 


134 The Fate of the Family 

Before this, however, he had gone to a school in 
Pittsburgh where a professor with insight and under¬ 
standing undertook to train him in the reading of 
classic literature, with the idea that he could earn his 
living on the lecture platform as a reader. Now he 
determined to utilize that training. He memorized 
great passages from classical literature and successfully 
started a career as a literary interpreter. There came, 
however, invitations to tell his life’s story, and interpre¬ 
tation of the struggle which he had made against diffi¬ 
culties proved so fascinating to the public that he went 
up and down the country telling the story of his tri¬ 
umph. Never has he been as necessary to the Ameri¬ 
can public as during this depression. He often lec¬ 
tures at Harvard. He has lectured at the University of 
Chicago. He has been back and forth across the United 
States alone some thirty times. Not long ago we had 
a card from him postmarked Hawaii, and then another 
from the Panama Canal. 

This story is given to make concrete one way in 
which people meet crises. I have worked out an analy¬ 
sis of this road in terms of attitudes, personal results 
and social results. It starts, it seems to me, with a set 
of fairly definite attitudes. When the crisis occurs, 
the individual meets it with faith, humility, intellectual 
alertness and constant will for good. As a result, he 
develops a sense of self-worth; gradually he gathers 
together his personal forces; he increases practice of 
useful skills and habits. Social results accompany self¬ 
development. The individual finds himself a member 


When People Meet Crises 135 

of some group with high standards. He develops a 
morale for the improvement of his own standards. He 
finds himself supported by the good will of other peo¬ 
ple and a growing group around him. In addition, he 
eliminates waste of energy and ability due to hate, 
rivalry and such baser passions, and finds himself with 
a feeling that he is living a life which has something 
of a universal meaning. Others want to hear his story. 
He is living not for himself; he is living for others. 
He becomes a member of a surviving group and lives 
with that group. This is what I call the road to per¬ 
sonal and social salvation. It involves the triumph of 
character over difficulties. 

On the other hand, I have in mind a young Jewish 
man who underwent progressive deterioration. The 
loss of his job brought a sense of crisis in his life which 
he could not bring himself to meet. He visited astrolo¬ 
gers, spiritualists and clairvoyants for light on his fu¬ 
ture. He did not want to face the future; he wanted 
to know about it. He was anxious to solve the prob¬ 
lem of the future through foreknowledge, not through 
courage and adventure. As is generally the case, their 
advice simply added to the confusion of his inner life. 
From some of their hints he decided that his wife was 
unfaithful to him and he began to blame her and to 
center his suspicions on an acquaintance. Along with 
this chaotic attempt to evade a crisis there came, of 
course, an increasing tendency toward emotional ex¬ 
plosion, a loss of his skill and a general lack of personal 
responsibility. He lost standing with possible employ- 


The Fate of the Family 


136 

ers, and from being unemployed he became unemploy¬ 
able. The process gained momentum until he became 
so mentally disturbed that it was found necessary to 
send him to an institution. 

Here is an example of the worst way of meeting a 
crisis. The steps in this process of deterioration, it 
seems to me, are as definite as the steps in the process 
of personal integration which I previously described. 
When this young man reached a crisis in his life he 
met it with evasion and compromise, bluffing, shifting 
responsibility. He took refuge in delusion, cynicism, 
bitterness, hate and suspicion, all of which worked it¬ 
self out in a set of personal results. He became more 
and more given to emotional explosions, to lack of con¬ 
trol. He sought to hide from life by taking refuge 
with those who claim to deal with life in “ occult ” 
terms. His surrender entailed loss of skill and intel¬ 
lectual ability. He was not a person associated with 
others in a collective approach to life; when he joined 
with others, it was in a cult of self-defense or in an 
organized effort to win at the expense of others. He 
took refuge in hearsay and false reports which brought 
temporary comfort to his soul. His loss of skill and of 
knowledge increased progressively. He lost all capacity 
to work with other people. And so the end was a hos¬ 
pital. This I call the lower road. I think one might 
even call it the road to hell — a modern definition of 
hell, even as the other road was to a modern conception 
of heaven. 


XIV 


SOCIETIES OF INTERPRETATION 

THERE ARE certain institutions in a community 
which have as their purpose interpretation, relaxation, 
mutual sharing and recuperation. They are not like 
grocery stores or schoolhouses or courthouses, or any 
of the so-called “ useful ” institutions. Many of them 
are places to which men retire in their leisure. This 
does not mean that they are unnecessary institutions. 
The unanimity with which men seek them proves that 
they are vitally necessary. They are institutions in which 
men and women achieve status, get recognition, or are 
reassured in their purposes. A sketch from Batter Ca\e 
Flats, an unpublished manuscript, illustrates in terms 
of two simple individuals the necessary part which such 
institutions may play in the life of a family: 

Johnnie Williams and his wife, Mary, are some¬ 
what like our old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Jack 
Spratt. Johnnie is short of stature and weighs be¬ 
tween 180 and 200 pounds, while Mary is about 
six feet in height and tips the scales at 125. 

When the teacher first knew these two they were 
living in a tent in a section of the city that lies be- 
*37 


i 3 8 


The Fate of the Family 


tween the river and the packing houses called 
Batter Cake Flats. As far as education was con¬ 
cerned neither boasted of a very complete knowl¬ 
edge of the three R’s. The religious background 
on the early record is put down as Catholic, but 
their standing with the denomination would be 
rated as very low. Their social status, on the other 
hand, would be rated as very high in their own 
community. 

Johnnie at this time was a horse trader and gam¬ 
bler by profession. His winnings were often quite 
large but the men said that he “played square.” 
He never “ cheated a friend.” He was always 
ready to help a “ fellow who was out of luck,” that 
is to say, had come into legal entanglements. He 
was often called upon to sit up with the sick and 
could always be counted upon to contribute his 
share for funeral expenses whenever there was a 
death among the campers. He was a man of few 
words but those few words were usually the de¬ 
termining ones in case of a dispute in the crowd. 
Johnnie was considered a good provider. His 
camp outfit was the best in the neighborhood. He 
was devoted to his wife and kind to her when he 
was sober. Every other Saturday was traders’ day 
when he took his horses to the city square; every 
other Saturday morning he came home “ fightin’ 
drunk ” and his wife and friends gave him 
of room. 

Mary was a regular attendant at the little mission 


Societies of Interpretation 139 

and took an active part in all its activities. She 
became a loyal friend of one of the workers who 
was the teacher of the Worth-while Class, a young 
woman’s Bible class in the “ big church up town.” 
Mary visited the class one Sunday and was sur¬ 
prised to find “ the girls weren’t stuck up a bit.” 
They welcomed her most cordially. Almost be¬ 
fore they realized it Mary was taking her place in 
the class and had become a very important link 
between the big church and the mission in the 
flats. The friendship of the members of this class 
did much to change Mary’s outlook upon life and 
helped her over many a hard place. While to the 
young women themselves the term social service 
began to take on a new and richer meaning. 

One day the teacher visited Mary and found her 
very much excited. “ Didn’t you read about John¬ 
nie in the society column of the morning journal? 
Well, he and Bud Avery had a terrible fight and 
cut each other up plumb awful. Bud, he’s in the 
hospital and Johnnie’s out on bail. I done taken 
him to the priest and made him promise not to 
drink another drop till Easter.” 

But alas for promises, long before Easter, early 
one Sunday morning the teacher was awakened 
by a prolonged ringing of the front door bell. 
There was Mary, clothes torn, hair disheveled, 
glasses askew — the trouble ? In spite of her warn¬ 
ing that no drinking or gambling should go on 
around “ her place ” Johnnie had brought in a 


140 The Fate of the Family 

number of the old gang the night before and the 
party was lasting into the early morning hours. 
Finally Mary could stand it no longer. She 
knocked over their table, scattered their cards and 
money and dashed the bottles of whiskey against 
the wagon wheels. The men departed in haste. 
Johnnie, half drunk, had attempted to administer 
punishment and Mary had come to the only place 
of refuge she knew. The next day, in spite of 
Johnnie’s pleadings and promises, Mary filed suit 
for divorce, packed up her few belongings, rented 
a room and went to work in a cotton mill. 

With the closing of the saloons Johnnie’s op¬ 
portunity for the fortnightly spree was cut off. A 
trial of bootlegger’s whiskey sent him to the hos¬ 
pital. He was so frightened by this experience 
that no amount of persuasion could induce him to 
try it again. After two years of “ decent living ” 
and hard work, Mary took Johnnie back. There 
were three conditions: no more gambling, no more 
drink and no tent but a house like the Worth¬ 
while girls have. “Don’t none of them live in 
tents.” 

After a long absence the teacher was again in 
the city and visited her old friends. She found 
Johnnie the owner of a small store where he was 
doing a fair business in harness and second-hand 
furniture. Mary was at home busy with her house¬ 
hold duties. Besides the cottage, which was en¬ 
tirely paid for, they owned a fine Jersey cow. 


Societies of Interpretation 141 

Mary sold milk to the neighbors and gave away 
much where it was needed. At Christmas time 
it has become their custom to put up a big Christ¬ 
mas tree in the front room. Here the Worth-while 
girls give a party for a group of little children in 
whom the class has been interested, many of them 
youngsters whom Mrs. Williams has been instru¬ 
mental in bringing to the “big Sunday school.” 
“ You see they learn so much more up there just 
gettin’ to know nice folks.” Mr. Williams makes 
a wonderful Santa Claus. The short, stout, jolly 
old gentleman couldn’t be better impersonated. 

When the teacher’s visit was over and she was 
ready to leave the city Johnnie and Mary were at 
the station to say good-by. Johnnie confided the 
information that he always had a little money laid 
by in the bank to take care of Mary in case anything 
should happen to him. Mary said that she thought 
Johnnie would be joining the church pretty soon. 
He always was a “ plumb good man.” He just 
couldn’t leave whiskey alone. 

In this history the saloon, the club and the church 
all appear as institutions to which people retire in times 
of need for some kind of help. In our last chapter 
I referred to the Jewish boy who followed a course 
leading to increasing spiritual chaos, aided and abetted 
by the institutions in which he sought help. It is a 
story of a pilgrimage among astrologers and spiritual¬ 
ists and clairvoyants. Fortunately, the social worker on 


The Fate of the Family 


142 

the case gives the picture of a type of institution by re¬ 
porting his conversation with an astrologer to whom 
the young man went. This astrologer was apparently 
the person who started him off in pursuit of his pot 
of gold. She was the first of a long list of mediums 
whom he had visited and it was through her that he 
had first become interested in the occult. The young 
man went to her often because she temporarily eased 
his mind. He described her as the world’s greatest 
astrologer. She herself, however, was more modest; 
she only claimed to be the foremost American astrol¬ 
oger. According to her business card, she was prepared 
by scientific study of the stars to give counsel in all the 
affairs of life. For private interviews she charged 
women five dollars and men ten dollars. Business 
forecasts, with dates of events and typewritten horo¬ 
scopes, were fifteen dollars. Her apartment was at¬ 
tractive, well furnished. The astrologer was perhaps 
fifty years old, a woman of education and culture. She 
claimed to have several college degrees. When asked re¬ 
garding the patient, she at first denied all acquaintance 
with him but finally succeeded in remembering him. 
“ What is the theory of astrology ? ” the social worker 
asked. The answer: 

If you know the exact day and hour and moment 
when a child is born you can then, by determining 
the position of the planets, forecast the influences 
which dominate that child’s life. This follows 
with the doctrine of correspondence, the planets 


Societies of Interpretation 143 

representing the organs of the Grand Man of God, 
and the child at his birth being an expression of 
the Grand Man at that time. It is mathematics — 
advanced mathematics. However, it is necessary to 
take into account not merely the charts of the 
heavens, but also the status of the family. I re¬ 
cently made a horoscope for Mayor C’s baby and 
another for the baby of a physician, a friend of the 
Mayor, both babies being born within twenty 
minutes of each other. While the chart of the 
heavens would therefore be the same for the two, 
the forecast would differ because the physician’s 
status would remain constant while C is likely to 
become senator and go up and up. It is possible 
not merely to make horoscopes for human beings. 
I have myself only recently made the horoscope 
of a cat. ... It is only when we proceed blindly 
that certain things result. The wise man rules his 
stars. 

I am especially interested in the medical aspects 
of astrology. The Twelve Tissue Builders of 
Schuessler, published in 1914, is a work in which I 
place special reliance. 

She offered to give a horoscope for the investigator, 
but as he did not know the exact hour and moment of 
birth this was impossible. However, he gave his birth¬ 
day and the year of birth and said, “ Suppose it were 
one o’clock in the morning ? ” The results were highly 
favorable. By great good luck he hit upon the most 


The Fate of the Family 


144 

auspicious hour in the day for being ushered into the 
world. Her forecast for this poor old world was much 
less favorable. 

This is the end of an age. Two thousand years 
ago a new sun had arisen in Pisces, the Fishes, or 
in the Twelfth sign in the Zodiac and a new gospel 
or mythos was said to have been promulgated by 
fishermen and water became the symbol of that 
age. In that sign we have been born and baptized 
and saved and Christ even represented himself as 
a “ fountain of living water.” But everything that 
the old sun stands for will now be thrown down. 
The new age will be one of air and light and elec¬ 
tricity. The old age has been an age of horizontal 
warfare. The new age will be one of vertical 
warfare. Armageddon will now be fought out 
in the air. The old age has been one in which 
men have ruled. In the new age there will be a 
matriarchal form of government. The women are 
coming back into power. There is going to be a 
terrible trial of strength between Catholics and 
Protestants with a resulting destruction of them 
both. In fact, we are going to be destroyed in a 
night and only a few will be saved. But a new 
order of man is going to be evolved so far in ad¬ 
vance of the man of today that we cannot even 
conceive what we will be like. 

Is it not evident that a man in spiritual, emotional or 
intellectual distress who listens to information or 


Societies of Interpretation 145 

prophecy of this type will find not increased power to 
meet crises, but rather an increase in his own mental 
chaos? I am willing to admit that there are many 
religious services which might have the same effect. 
The point I wish to make is this: In every community 
there is a multiplicity of institutions to which a per¬ 
son can apply in times of stress, some of which help 
to lighten and some of which deepen chaos in one’s 
life. Many men get drunk for the same reasons that 
other people are religious. It gives one a temporary 
release from strain but leaves one ultimately disturbed. 

Many people — for the above case record is typical — 
increase the chaos in their lives by seeking contact with 
those who connect them with a chaotic universe. I 
would like to suggest an experiment for those im¬ 
pressed by this situation. You may call it a laboratory 
experiment in social psychology. You can try this on 
yourself and be your own judge of the results. I sug¬ 
gest that next Sunday afternoon you attend any one of 
the theaters in your city and expose yourself to the 
program. I shall not determine for you to which one 
you should go; probably, for my purpose, the worse the 
show the better. Then, after exposing yourself about 
an hour, I suggest you go to church and sit through, 
and enter into, the Sunday vesper service. Test the 
effect on your own faith and courage, the subordination 
of those qualities which relate you to the animal world 
and the exaltation of those which make you a person 
with the power to follow through on ideas and play 
your role in life. If I am not mistaken you will find 


The Fate of the Family 


146 

that the hour spent at the church, be it Protestant, Cath¬ 
olic or Jewish, will increase your ability to overcome 
those difficulties which must be overcome if you are 
to bear the responsibilities which an individual must 
take in the intimate relationships of life. This is not my 
personal judgment. Those who have been carrying 
on experiments in the study of the family can show by 
statistics that the chances for success in family life 
are very much increased by some association with the 
church and religion. 

If one were to make a reasonable list of those virtues 
which work for personal and group success and those 
vices which work for personal and group failure, the 
scale would look something like the chart on the op¬ 
posite page. 

I suggest that we test our institutional experience on 
these two planes. If an institution increases ability to 
follow any project with constant good will, faith, hu¬ 
mility and intellectual alertness, with their consequent 
personal and social results, it brings mental health. If 
on the other hand it encourages bluffing, shifting of 
responsibility, taking refuge in illusion, in the practice 
of cynicism, bitterness and hate with their consequent 
personal and social results, it is a source of mental dis¬ 
ease; it deepens the chaos in our lives, and though 
temporarily it may have seemed a good experience, it 
has really routed us away from reality rather than into 
it. It has offered us poison and not health. 



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XV 


RELIGION AS A RESOURCE FOR MENTAL 
HEALTH 

WE NOW RETURN to the questions with which we 
were concerned in the first chapter. We shall here 
explore the interplay between the family and religion. 
We must be prepared to see the family betrayed by re¬ 
ligion even as it has been betrayed by society. But be¬ 
fore we can understand that betrayal we must make 
clear to ourselves just what is the genius of religion. 
All through these pages we have been using religious 
words — values, devotion, will to live, the role of the 
individual, love and loyalty. These terms express the 
stuff out of which society is made, and they also are 
of the stuff of which religions are made. Religion is 
man in his believing and evaluating capacity. It is an 
answer to certain fundamental needs of man. Man, to 
be sure, is a physical being and demands food and 
clothing; but he is also a social being, and in this 
capacity he has certain characteristics which are pe¬ 
culiarly his own and through which his religious ac¬ 
tivities arise. 

Four of these characteristics we should make very 
clear and definite to ourselves. First, man is a being 

148 


Religion as a Resource for Mental Health 149 

that hopes and fears. He is concerned about his fate 
in the universe. He does not know, and is worried 
about, what the morrow will bring. This was true of 
the ancient cave man and it is true of the modern 
science-enlightened man. In fact, I think it may be 
fairly said that modern scientific and technological de¬ 
velopment has increased, rather than allayed, man’s 
fears. When I pray, “ Give us this day our daily bread,” 
I think of more obstacles to the fulfillment of that 
prayer than my grandfather knew anything about. He 
probably thought of sun and rain and soil and an 
abundant harvest. I think of all these, and in addition, 
railroads, labor unions, gangsters and profiteers and 
government policies; all man-made obstacles now 
added to the cosmic hazards which constituted the 
threat in the lives of my fathers. I know more diseases 
than they ever knew. We are able to control some of 
them under certain circumstances, but I know of so 
many more which might threaten my life that my 
sense of uneasiness has been increased rather than de¬ 
creased in recent years. We can control cholera, bu¬ 
bonic plague and typhoid fever, provided the social 
organization holds, but who knows that it will? 
The British government has these three great threats 
to human existence fairly well under control in India; 
but who knows how long the British will have control 
of India? Never wholly laid are these great physical 
and cosmic threats to life which keep fear still alive in 
the human heart. 

A friend of mine once said that religion comes in at 


The Fate of the Family 


150 

that point where what a man does depends not on what 
he knows, but on what he dares. This fact, he says, 
constitutes the reason for the need of ministers at wed¬ 
dings and at funerals, for both are ventures into the 
unknown. All of life is an adventure in the un¬ 
known, and the character of a man’s adventure is more 
largely dependent on his courage than it is on his 
knowledge. Courage, then, is one characteristic human 
need. 

A second great need is for recognition. Man cannot 
abide loneliness. 

In the third place, man is a being who must find 
meaning in life. He abhors futility. When Colonel 
Goethals directed the construction of the Panama 
Canal, a part of his technique for building the morale 
of his men was to impress upon them the idea that they 
were doing this work for Uncle Sam. Who was Uncle 
Sam? Uncle Sam was an abstract character symbolic 
of millions of Americans who wanted this work done. 
They were not working for themselves, these men dig¬ 
ging dirt on the Panama Canal. They were working 
for a larger than themselves. 

Finally, man demands continuity. He abhors anni¬ 
hilation. The total obliteration of his own life and that 
in which he is involved, his friends and the causes he 
serves, is something he cannot face and so he demands 
continuity to exist longer than his own meager life. 
He hopes and believes that in a world of larger scope, 
that which he has faithfully worked for will be com¬ 
pleted, not undone. 


Religion as a Resource for Mental Health 151 

These major outreaches of the human spirit consti¬ 
tute the very essence of the human personality, and it 
is in the realm of these aspirations that we find re¬ 
ligion coming to the front. Religion masses its minis¬ 
trations at those points where human beings feel the 
emotional strain of life in one or more of these four 
ways which I have just suggested. If one studies the 
great religious festivals and services, one finds that they 
cluster around those places, those incidents and those 
occasions where men feel thwarted in their hope, or 
in their desire for recognition, or in their desire to 
find some meaning and continuity in life. 

Religion is more than aspiration, but those major 
aspirations are the signposts which turn us in the di¬ 
rection of an understanding of religion. Let us not at 
this point make the mistake of identifying religion with 
these hopes and desires. No, religions are more than 
that. They never spring up just because men hope. 
They grow up around those facts which give men 
hope. No religion ever developed around fear alone, 
or around the desire for recognition or for meaning in 
life. Religions grow at that point where man has found 
some fact which he thinks gives him the right to hope 
or offers him recognition or meaning in the sense of 
continuity in life. Those men were wise who said that 
religion is built on revelation. By revelation they 
mean those evidences which give man the right to 
hope and not to fear, to feel comradeship and not to 
be lonesome, to work with causes with a sense of de¬ 
votion rather than futility, and to believe in the ulti- 


The Fate of the Family 


152 

mate completeness of life. Of course there has been 
much of what has been called revelation that will not 
stand the tests which man has sought to impose upon 
it. Some freak of nature has often seemed a valid basis 
for hope, and man has built his life upon sand. But 
the religions which have continued are rooted in the 
soil of experiment with reality which has so validated 
man’s experience with reality through love and faith 
as to justify his continuing exercise of these qualities. 

The function of the church is the perpetual celebra¬ 
tion of man’s experience with reality through faith and 
love. The church gathers together those facts which 
constitute for man the great assurances of life. It per¬ 
petually recites them. It tells the story of those great 
personalities who convince us that men of character 
have justified our right to believe that we can make 
our lives sublime. The church is built not on man’s 
longing, although it answers to a longing. The church 
gathers together those great assurances which provide 
answer to those four primary needs of the human spirit. 
If one analyzes the great festival days, the great calen¬ 
dars of the church, especially of the Roman Catholic 
church, one will find that the key which unlocks them 
is just this key which I have described. One finds the 
great festival occasions organized at those points where 
men stand in danger of falling victims either to loneli¬ 
ness or futility or to the threat of annihilation. 

Much discussion of what the church should do for 
people ignores this need and ignores also the capacity 
of the church to meet it. The church has been asked 


Religion as a Resource for Mental Health 153 

to give physical comfort, but somehow it never does 
this very well. The church has even been asked to 
make people moral, and again it disappoints its pe¬ 
titioners. The only valid demand, I think, is this: The 
church should keep people from being discouraged, 
isolated individuals who become frantic with fear or 
insane in the face of the great cosmic and social hazards 
of life. The function of the church seems to me the 
establishment of an inner community built on faith in 
the ultimate loving purpose of the universe, in which 
the individual becomes a member, in the eyes of which 
he wishes to be a success, and which, in turn, gives him 
a significant role to play in society. 

I have said that the church masses its ministrations 
at the point of man’s greatest emotional strains. A 
few years ago, while traveling in India, I noticed that 
at the corner of every village was an image of the rain 
god, the snake god, the cholera god, the moneylender 
god and the drought god. I was told that each of these 
images represented a major fear of the Indian farmer. 
These were his great worries, his great anxieties, his 
chief emotional strains. Religion had massed its minis¬ 
trations at these points. That is what religion should 
do. 

Religion is effective in working with the family only 
under certain conditions. Religious leaders must rec¬ 
ognize— and many have — that man’s major hopes 
and fears vary with his activities. He has one set of 
hopes and anxieties about his business, another about 
his politics, still another about his family. As there 


i 54 


The Fate of the Family 


are no feelings in life so deep as those which gather 
around family life, so the fears, hopes, anxieties arising 
from family problems are the most serious source of 
strain for the individual. It is at this point that the 
church is most needed and that it has attempted to mass 
its ministrations. 


XVI 


WHEN RELIGIONS BEHAVE BADLY 

BEFORE I DEAL with what might be called good be¬ 
havior on the part of religion with reference to the 
family, I want to enumerate the various kinds of be¬ 
havior which may be classified as bad. 

Religions behave badly when they try to set over the 
family a theocratic control which legalistically restricts 
its freedom. There is no area of life which religion 
has so invaded with the mailed fist of legalistic con¬ 
trol as the family to which it is so intimately related. 
Legislation, good social practice and even the ministra¬ 
tions of mercy have been hindered by religious legal¬ 
ism. The Scotch physician who wished to introduce 
anesthesia in childbirth was told by the clergy that he 
was interfering with the original curse which God 
pronounced upon women when Eve was expelled from 
the Garden of Eden. Not until the canny Scotchman 
called attention to the biblical statement that when 
God took Eve from the body of Adam he caused a deep 
sleep to fall upon Adam, was he able to justify use of 
anesthetics. Something of the same stubborn formal¬ 
ism has characterized the fight of the church against 
any reasonable legislation affecting divorce and remar¬ 
ks 


The Fate of the Family 


156 

riage. As women have emerged into larger and larger 
participation in social life they have been compelled to 
fight against some very foolish remarks on the part of 
St. Paul as to the place of women in ecclesiastical so¬ 
ciety. In all these instances we have religion doing 
that which we refuse to recognize as good when it is 
done by the state or the race. Religion is trying to set 
up a totalitarian legalistic society. 

Again, religion has behaved badly when it has looked 
upon sex life as sinful and has turned man in the di¬ 
rection of asceticism. We cannot get away from the 
fact that the New Testament story of the virgin birth of 
Jesus reflects a tendency in this direction, or at any 
rate provides ground for rationalization of this tend¬ 
ency. 

Religions have behaved badly when they have 
thrown their weight on the side of chaotic personal be¬ 
havior. In an earlier chapter I listed those vices which 
tend to personal and social disintegration. I refer to 
them again here to call attention to the fact that re¬ 
ligion often encourages man’s tendency to bluff, to 
evade reality, and to take the lower level in the struggle 
for life. Psychiatrists often look upon religion as a 
liability in social reconstruction because they believe it 
increases man’s tendency to follow disintegrating vices. 

Religions behave badly when they fail to discriminate 
in their emphasis on moral behavior. They often over¬ 
exalt small virtues and thus distort the moral life. The 
following case history will serve as a typical picture of 
much of the bad behavior into which people are often 
led by the church: 


When Religions Behave Badly 157 

Jean was eighteen years old when she first came to 
the attention of medical and social agencies. Her little 
niceties of manner and certain manifest refinement at 
once singled her out from the group of women with 
whom she was confined in the County Jail. The jailer 
said, “ she sure was a pretty little flapper and a wild 
one, too ” but somehow she was “ different ” from the 
rest. She had been in jail six weeks and he hadn’t 
heard her “ cuss ” yet. 

According to Jean’s own story, which was later veri¬ 
fied, she had been reared in a home of wealth and 
comfort. Accustomed to attention from servants and 
governesses, she had never learned to do for herself 
the tasks which are required of the majority of girls. 
She did not know how to manage without these at¬ 
tentions and was seriously handicapped in her at¬ 
tempts to earn her livelihood. 

There were eleven children in the family, six younger 
than herself, the twins among them, whom she “ wor¬ 
shiped to distraction.” Her parents were Scotch Pres¬ 
byterians ; her father the great High Priest and all wise 
judge for his family, from whose decisions there was 
no appeal. (It is hardly necessary to say that the family 
was distinctly a patriarchy.) As Jean said, she and 
her father “ never could get along.” She could not re¬ 
member the time when she was not “ wild to have a 
good time.” She “ loved to dance ” and “ adored the 
movies.” Her “ worldliAess ” had always been a trial 
to her father. She repeatedly declared that, as a child, 
she had been afraid of her father and now she despised 
him. Said she “ guessed they were too much alike.” 


The Fate of the Family 


158 

He couldn’t “bear for anyone to cross him” and 
neither could she. Her mother was kind but she 
thought everything the father did was “just right.” 
She thought her mother was afraid of him. 

At the age of sixteen Jean ran away from home for 
the first time. With a classmate, with whom she had 
been forbidden to associate, she went to Kansas City. 
They were found at a hotel by a detective sent out 
from Mr. Me Weldon’s office. After Jean was brought 
home she was put under close surveillance, not allowed 
to leave the house alone. The “ wayward ” daughter 
was made the subject of prayer when the family and 
servants were called together for morning and evening 
worship. To gain her freedom, she finally professed 
“conviction of sin and repentance.” 

The next year when Jean was seventeen and in the 
ninth grade she answered an advertisement for a danc¬ 
ing teacher in an Eastland cabaret. Her application 
was accepted. Taking fifty dollars from her mother’s 
purse, she kissed the sleeping twins good-by and went 
out into the night. Again after a few weeks Jean was 
found and brought home, but not before she had had a 
love affair with a man much older than herself to 
whom she became engaged. 

When Jean escaped from home the third time she 
left with this man whom she had met at Eastland. 
She went as his wife only to find out shortly afterward 
that he was a married man with a family. After this 
nothing mattered. She was madly immoral and finally 
landed in the County Jail. On the docket she was 


When Religions Behave Badly 159 

booked for prostitution and theft. She was listed under 
a fictitious name. 

Facing each other across the flat-topped desk in Mr. 
Me Weldon’s private office, the Girls’ Protective Agency 
worker and Mr. McWeldon discussed Jean. The father 
was obdurate. He said that he had brought Jean home 
twice. This time she must go her “own gait.” He 
could not further compromise himself and his family 
by acknowledging her as his daughter. Jean must 
“ reach her extremity ” before anything could be done 
for her and emphasizing this statement by pounding 
with his fist upon the desk, he concluded, “ She has the 
devil in her and not until she is converted and comes 
to me as the prodigal did to his father, will I forgive 
her.” He refused any help. 

Mrs. McWeldon said that Jean had always been a 
rebellious child but an affectionate one. She did well in 
school until she reached the sixth grade when school 
became a matter of secondary importance. So they 
placed her in a private school and gave her music and 
expression. She liked to dance and she seemed to en¬ 
joy the expression lessons but would not practice her 
music lesson. She would like to help Jean but she can’t 
do very much against the wishes of Mr. McWeldon. 
She would like Jean to have the advantage of a mental 
and physical examination and special care if this seems 
necessary. If the worker will try to find some way for 
Jean to make good she will help as much as she dares 
financially. Mr. McWeldon checks all the accounts and 
this will be difficult. 


The Fate of the Family 
“ Dear Miss M. . . . 

I must tell you I am so grateful to you for the 
assistance you have given and are giving to my 
Jean. I did try to give her up at one time but the 
Lord showed me plainly it was wrong to even 
try to do so and ever since my prayers daily and 
often I can’t sleep for longing for her and M. . . . 
that I spend a great deal of the night asking God 
our Father to bring them to understand that the 
ways of Eternal Life far exceed those of sin in 
happiness now and hereafter. Now Miss M. . . . 
we want to help you. I will ask you to let us know 
what the amount of a room and board in a nice 
place will be by the week and I have some of her 
clothes here and I would like to bring them to her 
so I could see her. Now I thought with us paying 
her board she could be able to clothe herself and 
live respectably and give her a chance to be what 
she should be and then come home. Our desire is 
to have her now but three times were such failures 
that we want to try some other way. Now if you 
think that it would be best for me not to come will 
leave it with you or will come this week if she 
wants me or you think it would help for there is 
not much happiness for me until my two girls are 
settled Christians. Well Miss M. . . . I hope you 
will be able to understand my meaning for it’s very 
hard for me to express it. May God make you to 
understand that my heart has been bleeding ever 


When Religions Behave Badly 161 

since she left me so heartlessly and I never went 
to bed until three o’clock sitting watching and wait¬ 
ing for her the last time. Tell her I love her and 
want her to be a lady and want to do what I’ve 
written you and you may show her this letter if 
you like. Please answer me soon. Will be waiting 
you know for the answer. 

Your friend in Jesus the Christ.” 

“ Dear Miss M. . . . 

Was sorry I hadn’t time to see you again but I 
left a check for $35 written to Miss Me Weldon and 
Jean will have to do on this for one week for her ex¬ 
penses and get what clothing she can, also, and 
what do you think would be right to send each 
week as I would like to send it to you for her and 
you pay the room and board with it. I can’t send 
all she wants and she must learn or we cannot help 
her. My suffering is nearly greater than I can 
stand; so will look for an early answer. 

With Christian love, 

Please give the letter addressed to myself to Jean 
and tell her to give me her address. These little 
bookmarks we print to distribute — would be glad 
to send you all you could use.” 

“ I do not know what could be done further for you 
have been given this work to do and I know noth¬ 
ing about it, so be perfectly free to write us for 


162 


The Fate of the Family 


I want to do all in my power to help. Believe me 
your friend, 

Mrs. L. L. McWeldon 

P.S. We send you a % check to help Jean on an¬ 
other week.” 

“ Dear Miss M. . . . 

Just received your letter and do certainly thank 
you for your help and care of our lost girl. She 
will have to repent and let God cleanse her from 
sin before she can come to our home again and I 
told her plainly that I would have nothing to do 
with her getting any doctor and she must go to 
you and I was sure you could direct her what to 
do. She told me over the ’phone she needed a 
doctor and I told her I could have nothing to do 
with it, and you see she will not listen or obey me. 
She did something with her last coat we bought her 
and I have none to send at present. I can breathe 
better this morning, yesterday I felt I would choke 
all day and such a pain in my heart. None but 
God knows what I have suffered with my family 
and am still suffering but Satan has not been able 
to stop me or us from serving the Lord. We are 
supporting a missionary in Central America, sup¬ 
porting an orphan, help support a cripple man and 
we are giving away tracts by the hundred and God 
says his word shall not return void and the great 
pleasure is giving Bible lessons and teaching a Sun¬ 
day school class. Well, Miss M. . . . forgive me 


When Religions Behave Badly 163 

for not giving you that other money for really I 
was so hurt and was not myself for I told her to 
go to you for your assistance. She could get by 
and she will have to thank God for sending you to 
help her for it’s beyond me. M. ... is trying to 
help her also, so she (M. . . . ) writes me. Now 
if we are wrong in our dealings, please let us 
know.” 

The legalism, the substitution of religious benevo¬ 
lence for human love, revealed in the above picture, 
need no extended comment. Back of the bad be¬ 
havior is a religion which sins the sin of a misplaced 
emphasis. 

Religions behave badly when they fail to recognize 
the social nature and social conditioning of the family. 
Horace Bushnell said that the family was both the 
agent and the object of salvation. He hoped to see 
the time when individuals would grow up under the 
Christian nurture of the family and never realize that 
they had not been Christian. He places this picture 
over against that excessive emphasis on personal re¬ 
sponsibility which fails to recognize the interrelation¬ 
ship between individual and family. Religions often 
blame people for being false to their religious vows, 
without taking into account the social conditions which 
preceded the taking of these vows and those which fol¬ 
lowed after the vows had been taken. When the 
church acquiesces in social exploitation which robs fam¬ 
ilies of their opportunity to live the good life, it really 


The Fate of the Family 


164 

participates in the breaking of the vows by the families 
themselves; and when the church, possessing resources 
of mental health, does not make them available to the 
masses of the people, it is failing to do its part in mak¬ 
ing family life adequate. 



XVII 


WHEN RELIGIONS BEHAVE WELL 

OUR LAST chapter concerned types of socially bad 
behavior on the part of religion. In this chapter we 
shall look at the other side of the shield. 

Religions behave well when they offer to men fellow¬ 
ship in a society in which victory over hardness of heart, 
sensuality, pride and unbelief is an achievable goal. 
There is no social substitute for a kindhearted, cou¬ 
rageous, wholesome-minded person. The husband or 
wife of good character is the greatest agency making 
for a happy home. 

Religions behave well when they offer to people not 
theocratic legislation but a social imagination which 
makes it possible for those people to enter into the ex¬ 
periences of others and so identify themselves sym¬ 
pathetically with others. Jesus was one of the first to 
refer men to social imagination in discovering the good 
way of life. If you would know how to think of 
God, he said, imagine a good father. How would 
you treat your neighbor ? Use your imagination to put 
yourself in his place and treat him in the way you 
would be treated. Sin is to be fought in its imagination 
stage. Adultery and murder are first of all sins of 

165 


166 


The Fate of the Family 


the imagination; Jesus would fight them at this point. 
The Good Society concept began as a product of the 
creative imagination; it is the Holy City, the city not 
made with hands, the better country which men seek 
mentally as pilgrims. Religion which is brought to 
people in this spirit gives them a vocation, a role to 
play. They are stimulated to the highest type of co¬ 
operative self-investment. 

Religions behave well when they bend the career of 
men and women toward an integrated personal and 
social life built around a life philosophy based on ade¬ 
quate religious convictions. In another chapter we 
outlined those virtues which lead consecutively in the 
direction of a personally and socially integrated life. 
While recognizing that religion can work for personal 
disintegration, we also must realize it is one of the most 
powerful forces working in the direction of personal 
and social integration. Those religions which give 
man a belief in the integrity of the universe, which teach 
him that there is a good order of life which is built 
into the very structure of the universe, throw the weight 
of their influence upon integrity of action and thus 
reinforce man in his personal and social struggle. 

Religions behave well when they interweave the emo¬ 
tions which cluster around the ideas of the family of 
God and the City of God. The cultus of the church is 
rich with symbols and ritual which lift the family to 
the high plane of religious devotion. We should de¬ 
velop a cultus of the Holy City which will serve a simi¬ 
lar purpose so that men will approach the tasks of 


When Religions Behave Well 167 

citizenship with some of the sense of dedication and 
consecration with which they now approach the mar¬ 
riage altar. When we do this the achievement will be 
based partly on the conviction that cities can be made 
into places in which it is not only possible but normal 
for little children to grow up in security and happiness. 

Religions behave well, then, when they interweave 
the symbolism of the family with that drawn from 
religious experience, and when the cultus of religion 
reflects the experience drawn from the family. Let us 
enumerate those ritualistic services which the church 
performs inside the family and which have as their 
purpose the sanctifying of the family spirit: 

The Marriage Ceremony. The great opportunity of 
the church to exalt the home lies, of course, in this 
ritual. It should be regarded by the minister as a most 
solemn and sacred privilege. In every way in which 
he can co-operate, either by instruction, advice or in¬ 
spiration, he should magnify his social opportunity at 
this time. Many a pastor has made use of special 
literature which has been of value to both bride and 
groom in helping them to assume the joys and re¬ 
sponsibilities of home life. 

Family Worship. Nothing binds a home together 
and guarantees its Christian quality quite as much as 
family worship. The church should encourage the 
family altar, both by urging it upon people and by 
su gg es ting proper methods of procedure. 

Grace at Meals. The family meal is lifted into the 
realm of the sacramental by many social courtesies 


i68 


The Fate of the Family 


which gather about this occasion. Most important 
among ceremonies is the custom of returning thanks 
to the Heavenly Father for his goodness in making 
possible the fact of daily subsistence. 

Parish Visiting. In the parish visiting of the pastor 
and the friendly visitors of the church, official and non¬ 
official, there is a very important recognition of the 
home. The purpose of such visiting is not exhausted 
in a ministry to individuals. Its value lies in the seek¬ 
ing out and in the recognition of the home as a social 
group. The best parish visiting extends intimate pas¬ 
toral care to the entire family, being indeed, in spiritual 
matters, very much like the work of the friendly visitor 
to a household. 

In a similar fashion the cultus of the home is inter¬ 
woven with the services performed inside the church. 
Among these can be enumerated the following: 

The Family Pew. In the Protestant church the fam¬ 
ily pew represents a historic recognition which the 
church has given to the integrity of the home as a 
social unit. Although we are passing from the period 
when the church rents or sells its pews, there is a dis¬ 
tinct value in the attendance of the family as a unit 
at the church service, and it can easily be arranged by a 
proper system of ushering, even when pews are free. 

The Sacrament of Baptism. In the baptism of chil¬ 
dren, many of the Protestant churches see a consecra¬ 
tion service which recognizes the child’s relation to the 
Divine Father, and honors parenthood in its co-opera¬ 
tive relationships with the church in the training of 


When Religions Behave Well 169 

the child. The value of this attitude is to be recognized 
and the service honored because of its social message. 

Children’s Sunday. The church has here the op¬ 
portunity to honor childhood in a special way and to 
magnify in the minds of the people the sacredness of 
childhood and that institution from which the children 
come. 

Fathers’ and Sons’ Banquet. This fete, which many 
churches have recently provided, gives splendid rec¬ 
ognition to responsibility of the fathers for their sons 
and affords opportunity to increase the loyalty of the 
son to the father, and to the church as a second father. 

Mother’s Day. Churches are recognizing in this 
day a chance to exalt motherhood and to pay tribute to 
one who makes home life possible. The day has a dis¬ 
tinct social message and should be used by the churches 
to emphasize it. 

Education for Home Building in the Church. 
The best preparation for home building which the 
church gives is the general policy of exalting those 
ideals and virtues which make successful home build¬ 
ers. But there is a special type of education which the 
church can give, in classes which prepare young men 
and women for the duties and responsibilities of home 
life. Many churches have successfully provided 
mothers’ clubs in which the problem of home build¬ 
ing is discussed by those who are engaged in its respon¬ 
sibilities. Similar discussions are often taken up by 
men’s organizations in the church. 

The Church as Social Center for Future Home 


The Fate of the Family 


170 

Builders. The social life of the church has made pos¬ 
sible the meeting of innumerable young people where 
acquaintance has ripened into love, and love has been 
followed by marriage. This is a legitimate service to 
be planned for and encouraged in the church life. It 
guarantees the mating of people of similar religious 
ideals and ethical purposes. 

Religions behave well when they offer to people a fel¬ 
lowship in the eyes of which these people want to be 
a success. Through this means, it is evident, a role or. 
vocation is made for them in society. Once more, at the 
risk of overelaboration, I give a story from Batter Ca\e 
Flats. It is the story of “ Theopa of the Covered 
Wagon.” 

Theopa had lived under a canvas wagon top all 
of her life. In the spring and fall when the family 
moved from place to place gathering strawberries 
or picking cotton, the covered wagon provided 
both a shelter and a means of transportation. In 
the summer, when the family camped in a grove 
on the outskirts of the city, the wagon top was 
removed and converted into a tent, while the 
wagon itself was used for collecting and hauling 
junk. In the winter this portable home was usu¬ 
ally located near the city, in a certain community 
called Batter Cake Flats. If the cotton-picking 
season had been at all profitable the family went 
into winter quarters about the middle of Novem¬ 
ber and stayed until March or April or at least 


When Religions Behave Well 171 

until the “ cotton patch ” money gave out and they 
were forced to go to work again. As Theopa’s 
father used to say, “ It warn’t wuth it no ways to 
work in bad weather and the law was gettin’ 
mighty perticular about folks schoolin’ their kids 
in the winter.” 

The fall Theopa was twelve years old the family 
had had an unusually successful season in the cot¬ 
ton patch. Theopa herself had often picked three 
hundred pounds a day for which her father col¬ 
lected for the family treasury three dollars. For 
the first time in her life Theopa questioned the 
justice of this proceeding. She wanted some new 
clothes for school and above everything else she 
wanted a real doll like the ones she had seen in 
the stores Christmas after Christmas. Her father 
told her she was “ plumb silly ” while her mother 
said she had education enough. It was making her 
“ stuck up.” She could “ jest stay at home ” with 
them this winter and tell the school law when he 
would come around that she was fourteen and then 
the law couldn’t force them to send her to school. 

A few weeks later Theopa was caught in the act 
of stealing a doll from a display counter of a de¬ 
partment store. She was turned over to juvenile 
authorities. The chief probation officer at the 
courthouse started an investigation. He found 
that this was not the first petty thieving of which 
Theopa had been guilty but he also found out that 
this was the first thing she had taken for herself. 


172 


The Fate of the Family 


Other articles had been taken at the command of 
her mother or father. The arrest of the father 
followed. Theopa was made a ward of the court. 
There was no objection to this latter on the part 
of the parents. The father, glad enough to pay his 
own fine and make his escape, remarked, “ The 
law can do anything with Theopa it wants to. She 
sure has brought a peck of trouble on her family.” 

The matron was filling out Theopa’s application 
blank, a duplicate of which was to go to the file in 
the juvenile office. “ How old are you, Theopa ? ” 
“ Twelve.” “ Where were you born ? ” “ Trav- 
elin’.” “ Where? ” repeated the matron. “ Trav¬ 
eling” answered Theopa. The girl appeared sullen. 
The matron thought best to pass on to the next 
question. “ Where is your home now, Theopa ? ” 
“ Ain’t got none,” replied Theopa. “ Come, 
Theopa,” said the matron encouragingly, “ answer 
just this last question for me and I will take you 
to your room. I have one which I am sure you 
will like and you are going to find many things 
here which will make you happy. Where did you 
live before you came to us ? ” The officer, who had 
not yet taken his departure, spoke up. “ She’s just 
one of those cotton-picking children. She lives in 
a covered wagon.” Before the words were hardly 
out of his mouth Theopa had snatched the ink 
bottle from the matron’s desk and hurled it in the 
direction of the officer. There was a crash. “ O, 
my Lor’,” wailed Theopa, “ I’ve smashed the look- 


When Religions Behave Well 173 

in’ glass! Seven more years of bad luck” And 
she refused to be comforted all that day. 

When Theopa received her first complete outfit 
of new clothes her forlorn little face became almost 
expressive, and a hair ribbon, which had not come 
from her father’s junk heap, but which had been 
bought especially for her, brought the first smile. 
The matron showed her how to put her clothes 
away in the bureau in her room and how to hang 
the new gingham dresses each on its separate rack 
in the closet. But the next morning when the 
matron went to Theopa’s room the clothes were 
nowhere to be seen. The closet was empty. The 
bureau drawers were empty. Not one article of 
the new wardrobe was to be found. The matron 
went downstairs decidedly perplexed. After lunch, 
during rest hour, she returned. Theopa, pushing 
back the mattress of her bed, showed the matron 
the missing clothes all carefully folded up and 
hidden away between the mattress and the springs. 
Only after several tests were made of leaving out 
just one dress or one garment in the bureau drawer 
was Theopa fully persuaded that the other chil¬ 
dren did not want her beautiful new clothes and 
that no one would take them from her if she kept 
them as the matron had instructed. 

Care and training did much for Theopa. Her 
tantrums became less frequent and pilfering soon 
stopped when she found that in this new world, 
into which she had recently come, a person’s pos- 


i74 


The Fate of the Family 


sessions were sacred and swift punishment was 
meted out to any offender. The matron and the 
church lady, who came in her car to take the chil¬ 
dren to Sunday school, became her ideals and she 
set out to imitate them with all the force of will 
she possessed. One day, remembering perhaps the 
rough overseers in the cotton patch, the cuffs and 
beatings of her mother and the roughness of the 
other women with whom she had associated, she 
asked the Lady of the Car what made the matron 
different from other “ bosses.” Hardly knowing 
just how to answer the child she said, “Why, I 
don’t know, Theopa, unless it’s because she’s a per¬ 
fect lady.” 

The Lady of the Car and some other young 
women of the church, with their cars, made many 
trips to the cottage just before Christmas. No con¬ 
ception of Theopa’s vivid imagination had ever 
even glimpsed the glories of that first Christmas 
carol; her first Christmas tree; her first doll. What 
more could be wished for? 

In the spring a foster home was found for 
Theopa, where she was very happy and had many 
advantages. The Lady of the Car still treasures the 
first letter she received from Theopa after she had 
gone to her new home. 

“ My dear . . . 

I like my new home very much but John teases 
me sometimes. The other day he made me mad 


When Religions Behave Well 175 

and I started to throw a teacup at him but I remem¬ 
bered and didn’t. I am a perfect lady now. 

Your friend, 

Theopa.” 

Those who have read this little sketch may easily 
focus their attention on that which is to me nonessen¬ 
tial. I recognize that nothing is done for Theopa’s 
family — as a matter of fact she is taken out of the 
family. I recognize that nothing is done to right the 
wrongs of the cotton-pickers. Indeed, Theopa’s prob¬ 
lem is to an extent evaded when she ceases to be a 
cotton-picker. But all of this is not essential to my 
present interest. That which Theopa does get is a new 
picture of herself, a new role to play. She joins a group 
of people who establish for her a new vocation. She 
now has a picture of herself as a lady. This picture is 
drawn almost entirely from two religious workers in 
her environment. It is this new sense of a vocation 
in life which is much more important to her than her 
clothes or her physical surroundings, and it is this sense 
also which is the essence of that which the church has 
to give. 

Religions behave well when they make available the 
resources for mental health which are inherent in the 
doctrines believed in and experienced by a sincere 
church group. The confessionals of the older churches, 
the mental health clinics of more recent date, the class 
meetings and prayer meetings of the less formal 
churches, can all be looked upon as devices whereby 


The Fate of the Family 


17 6 

the hopes and fears of people are shared and directed 
to some profitable outcome. 

Religions behave well when they co-operate with 
other agencies in society which are especially designed to 
give aid to people. This is not the time to discuss how 
far the church should turn over to social agencies, pub¬ 
lic and private, its opportunity for ministering to the 
family. There probably is no hard and fast line to be 
drawn. To draw such a line immediately arouses such 
a host of objections to the policies it is meant to help 
that it seems best to leave the relationship co-operative 
and frank without legalistically determined boundaries. 

Religions behave well when they hold up to society 
the basic values and needs of the family and demand 
that the test of a good social order be, not profits written 
in the ledger, but the human test of the effects of a 
social order upon a wholesome, vigorous family life. 


XVIII 


WHOM HATH GOD JOINED? 

THROUGHOUT this study we have been facing the 
question of authority and purpose in the family. It 
is essentially the question: For whom does the family 
exist? In our study of Oriental families it was clear 
that the family existed for the sake of the race. In 
the conventional marriage the family existed for the 
sake of the class. In the democratic or romantic mar¬ 
riage, the family seemed to be founded on the romance 
and the satisfaction of the desires of the man and woman 
who entered into the relationship. In the totalitarian 
state marriage, in a very real sense, exists for the state. 
In the Christian system, however, marriage exists for 
God. 

“Whom God hath joined together,” then, would 
take on a meaning for us if we compared it with some 
other possible statements. We might for instance for¬ 
mulate these: 

“ Whom parental authority has joined together . . .” 

“ Whom class has joined together . . .” 

“ Whom we ourselves have joined together . . .” 

“ Whom the state has joined together . . .” 

We must recognize then that our formula “ Whom 

*77 


178 The Fate of the Family 

God hath joined together ” calls for a definition of God 
and the kind of society which he would sanction. The 
term evidently is kindred to the phrase, “ the City of 
God ” or “ the Kingdom of God.” In the history of 
Western religion these terms have been progressively 
defined. There was a time when God was identified 
with the race. At that time “ whom the race has joined 
together” and “whom God hath joined together” 
would have been synonymous. There was a time when 
God was identified with the state. At that time “ whom 
God hath joined together ” and “ whom the state hath 
joined together ” would have been identical statements. 
There was a time when God and custom were synony¬ 
mous. At that time “whom God hath joined to¬ 
gether” and “whom the sacred law hath joined to¬ 
gether ” would have been interchangeable. 

But in the New Testament and under the inspiration 
of Jesus of Nazareth the Society of God took on more 
profound meaning. It was stripped of race, of national 
and of legal definition, and those who were members 
of this new society were given a vocation to follow with 
persons who entered into fellowship with Jesus Christ. 
Those who entered into this fellowship were thrown 
back upon the use of their imagination in discovering, 
defining and defending that which was holy. They 
became the Society of the Holy Imagination. The 
New Testament is essentially a record of those who 
have accepted the Christian vocation. 

This vocation is defined, as are all vocations, by the 
story of typical persons, by little ethical codes and phi- 


Whom Hath God Joined? 179 

losophies of life, windows through which we can look 
at the inner life and purpose of a whole community. 
There was something universal about this community. 
It rose above all class and caste and racial boundaries. 
It was not static. It was dynamic and creative. It was 
a society based on faith, expressing itself in love. No 
longer was the Society of God identical with the state or 
race or class or custom. To be sure the phrases, “ the 
City of God ” and “ the Kingdom of God,” were still 
used but they meant that the City and the Kingdom 
were taking on more of the characteristics of the Society 
of God as defined in records of this early holy commu¬ 
nity. The phrase, then, “ whom God hath joined to¬ 
gether,” indicates that there is spiritual kinship between 
this interpretation of the Society of God and the family 
over which this sacred formula has been used. The 
family then becomes one of the ways in which the 
Christian vocation finds local and present interpreta¬ 
tion. Such interpretation cannot be worked out un¬ 
less there is freedom, mutuality of purpose and regard 
for other values of life. 

The statement, then, “whom God hath joined to¬ 
gether,” as over against a union rooting in the will of 
the race or the will of the class or the self-will of indi¬ 
viduals or the will of the state, is essentially a principle 
of freedom. It gives the family the right to rise above 
society in its customary aspects. On the other hand, 
it is a principle of social obligation as opposed to indi¬ 
vidual self-pleasing. It calls upon the individual to be 
reverent before all the obligations for carrying through 


180 The Fate of the Family 

the genius of the family and before the other values 
which reside in other functions of society. It stands 
for the subordination of both the part and the whole of 
society to an ethical world which has the right to criti¬ 
cize both. 

The phrase “ whom God hath joined together ” is 
not, then, the statement of a historical fact. God is 
not here conceived as a divine matchmaker who has 
brought these two people together from the ends of 
the earth. Rather it belongs to the language of rever¬ 
ence and dedication in the face of moral responsibili¬ 
ties. It signifies a mutual commitment to ideals which 
have been accepted by those entering into the relation¬ 
ship. It is the language of allegiance to a recognized 
spiritual economy. It should not be used where these 
conditions are not recognized. 

What is the function of a minister in a marriage 
ceremony ? If the most important problem about mar¬ 
riage is the physical problem, call in the doctor. If the 
most important problem is economic, call in the econo¬ 
mist. If the most important problems are housing and 
general social arrangements, call in the social engineer. 
If, however, the most important problems have to do 
with authority and purpose in family life and the rela¬ 
tionship of the family to a social and cosmic order, the 
minister has a real function, for he stands for that 
spiritual order which will defend the family against 
the state or the class or the race when these try to set 
themselves up as absolutes. He will defend the fam¬ 
ily against the passions which originate in the animal 


Whom Hath God Joined? 181 

world and which may finally disrupt the intimate rela¬ 
tionships of man and woman and parent and child. If 
the business of the church is to discover, define and 
defend that which is holy, the minister brings into the 
marriage ceremony that principle of reverence and 
dedication which makes the family free in the midst 
of those tyrannies which come up from the animal 
world and are ever present in the social world. 


XIX 


SUMMARY 

MOST OF OUR discussions have centered around 
the democratic family, a peculiar product of the West, 
the result of the emphasis of individual rights and free¬ 
dom. The democratic family at present shares in most 
of the strengths and weaknesses of the democratic phi¬ 
losophy of life. About the future of the family there 
can be no doubt; family life is older than any national 
life we know. It is older than the churches; it seems 
as old as human history. There have been different 
kinds of family life, to be sure, but wherever mankind 
has existed there has been some kind of society organ¬ 
ized around the control and direction of sex life. Fam¬ 
ily life has to a large extent shared in the type of culture 
and the general social organization of which it has been 
a part. As our own type of family life came with the 
democratic movement, it will share the fate of this 
movement in the future and whatever modifications 
take place in the movement will probably be registered 
also in the family. 

The democratic family, as I have said, stands over 
against two other types of family — the larger patriar¬ 
chal family of the Orient and the marriage of conven- 

i8z 


Summary 


183 

tion in Europe. In these types of family experience 
very little emphasis is laid upon the wishes and deci¬ 
sions of the bride and groom. The rights of society 
and the race are considered to such an extent that com¬ 
plete subordination of the desires of the individuals 
most concerned is taken for granted. But this does 
not mean that these marriages are totally without ro¬ 
mance. There are resources of romance in the conven¬ 
tional marriage and in the marriage of the Orient. The 
sense of devotion to a cause and sacrifice in itself lifts 
one up to a more significant plane of living than does 
the mere satisfaction of individual desires. We have 
called attention to the fact that millions of the world 
carry on under what might be called a nonromantic 
marriage system. Surely no one can be foolish enough 
to believe that these families are all without joy. 

The families of the democratic world are different. 
There is, first of all, freedom of courtship which starts 
early between Western boys and girls, and this ac¬ 
quaintance and courtship ripens early into a highly 
competitive state of love-making, with emphasis upon 
the freedom of those participating. If this courtship 
ripens into marriage the bride and groom accept for 
themselves generally the task of self-support, something 
unknown in Oriental countries. They live by them¬ 
selves in a single house or apartment, and they must be 
sufficient for each other’s company; this, too, is un¬ 
known in an Oriental country. It is assumed that they 
go through life in a relationship of fidelity. They 
freely associate with other people and bring their chil- 


The Fate of the Family 


184 

dren into a world of fairly free relationships. Thus the 
democratic marriage differs from Old World customs. 

But in spite of this individualistic emphasis there are 
those who say that democracy has not yet been suffi¬ 
ciently realized, that marriage is still keyed to a man¬ 
made world, that woman does not yet have a free field 
for the expression of her personality, and that fear and 
tradition still hold the family in bondage. These crit¬ 
ics would make the marriage relationship even freer 
than it is today. And it is possible that a larger free¬ 
dom and intelligence might bring more romance into 
the marriage relationship. 

There are others, however, who would improve the 
democratic marriage in another direction. They point 
to the fact that the rest of society — business, politics 
and religion — is already discovering the limitations 
of individualism as a philosophy of life, and that we 
are emerging from a period when the emphasis has 
been upon individualism into one where the emphasis 
will be upon the rights of society as a whole. They 
point to the fact that the great tasks of life are those 
in which people enter into agreements with one an- 
ofher and do things together which they cannot do 
alone, and that the law of all these realms is not the 
law of an accentuated individualism but of loyalty, 
sacrifice and subordination of self to the larger self. 

The great difficulty with a romantic marriage is that 
those who enter into it may forget that man as an in¬ 
dividual is under obligation to establish societies if he 
is to complete himself. Its critics point out that those 


Summary 


185 

who enter into the marriage experience must seek a 
further, larger experience, not through intensification 
of passion or the physical allurements of sex life, but 
in a larger recognition of those ways for social living 
which must be taken into account by those who form 
societies. The improvement of family life lies not so 
much in the hands of the doctor or the psychoanalyst 
as in the hands of those who lead the masses of the 
people and teach them the laws of social living. In 
other words, marriage needs not more individualism 
but a better social philosophy. When asked for a bill 
of particulars, these critics point to the laws of social 
living of which we must take account if a group of 
people are to enter into association with one another. 
There must, they say, be an integrity and sincerity of 
purpose on the part of those who enter into these so¬ 
cial relationships. There must be mutual sharing and 
answering trust. There must be a relationship of the 
family with the other great causes and the other great 
enthusiasms of society. 

Family life gets part of its romance out of the fact 
that it is a part of a great social will to live. That will 
is made up not only of family instincts and family satis¬ 
factions, but of the many other satisfactions which 
combine to make a great people. And if the family is 
going to have an abundance of romance, it must be a 
romance that it shares with the other great enthusiasms 
of society. People who enter into the intimate relation¬ 
ships of family life must understand that they establish 
roles for one another, that the roles of husband, brother, 


i8 6 


The Fate of the Family 


wife and sister root in an interacting relationship of 
persons who are joined together in the unit called the 
family. This interacting relationship can work in one 
of two ways: it can exalt people to a high plane of so¬ 
cial living, or it can bring them down to the lowest 
stages of personal and social disintegration. There¬ 
fore, these people who enter into this relationship be¬ 
come, to a greater or less extent, not individuals, but 
members of a society. It is failure to recognize this 
fact, these critics say, and not the limitations of the in¬ 
dividuals, which constitutes the real difficulty with the 
family at the present time. 

There are modifications in the democratic family ex¬ 
perience which, doubtless, can be turned to advantage. 
For instance, it might be possible to take advantage of 
the freedom of courtship and voluntary engagement 
to urge people to enter into the family relationships 
with more thoughtfulness, with more of an under¬ 
standing of one another’s likes and dislikes, with more 
purpose. Again, we might recognize that when two 
individuals pledge their fidelity to each other and go to 
live by themselves, their resources for fellowship are 
limited. That suggests the need for bringing in acces¬ 
sories of fellowship to keep the family from becoming 
isolated. Dr. Gerald Birney Smith, a former teacher 
of ethics at the University of Chicago, made the very 
wise statement that a church social was a place where 
two people who had been living something of an iso¬ 
lated life in a city apartment could associate with other 
men’s wives and other wives’ husbands on a basis of 


Summary 


187 

legitimate fellowship and thus increase the fellowship 
resources of a Western marriage. The principle is of 
great importance. Two individuals are in difficulty if 
they have no fellowship resources outside their own. 
Accordingly, there should be recognized, as a necessary 
accessory of the democratic marriage, a fairly large free¬ 
dom in orderly relationships, in the course of which 
men and women may get that degree of fellowship 
which, in the Orient, a couple get when they join one 
of the larger families. 

Passing from this basic modification of the individu¬ 
alistic principle, those who would modify the demo¬ 
cratic marriage call attention to the fact that family 
life at present is undergoing a great crisis, partly be¬ 
cause of the shift in modern society from a homespun 
to a machine age. Most of those duties which once 
made the family so important are now ceasing to be 
important; the family rests on a simple relationship and 
it must rely on common purpose to hold it together. 
It would be a major task to enumerate those various 
services bought in the market which once were per¬ 
formed by the housewife. We have called attention to 
the fact that probably one reason husbands have to give 
such close attention to business is that now they must 
earn the money to buy a very large number of services 
which once the wife provided inside the home. We 
come, then, to the question of how we may build an 
integrated modern family and help it meet its crises. 

Our problem here is to bring the family into rela¬ 
tionships with other agencies, some of them very mod- 


i88 


The Fate of the Family 


ern, and with those resources for mental health which 
make it possible for people to go through the crises of 
life with some measure of success. This is the task of 
the church, the school, the social workers, and those 
specialized agencies which are equipped to deal with 
the family. We must recognize that the great areas of 
family disorganization are not those in which people 
have opportunity to make some great choice in the di¬ 
rection of freedom; the great areas of family disorgani¬ 
zation are those in which everything else is disorgan¬ 
ized. In other words, family disorganization is a phase 
of a general social disorganization. And if we are 
really going to deal with it at all successfully, we will 
have to deal with the total disorganization. 

At present the redistribution of a large number of 
these families into a better, less disorganized economic 
life would probably do much to stabilize them. 

There are two further suggestions of ways in which 
we might help the family. We might work for a new 
conviction of the importance of family life, and for 
the development of social codes which will make peo¬ 
ple believe that the building of families and the rear¬ 
ing of children is necessary and worth sacrifice. The 
second is that to which I have already referred — the 
security of a social order in an economic system which 
does not penalize parenthood, but makes it more pos¬ 
sible. In other words, family life must be written into 
the fabric of the nation as one of the great group values 
for which the nation will contend and which it will 
constitute as the objective of national well-being. 


Summary 


189 

The future of the democratic family seems assured. 

No other institution in society shows any large tendency ^ 
to take over the family function. There are those who 
think that the state will take over the family function. 
The more I see of states and the more I see of Ameri¬ 
can political organization, the more I am satisfied it 
would be better for the ethics of the family to be ex¬ 
tended into the state rather than that the state should 
extend its type of life into the family. I believe that 
the increasing control of family by state is a peril which 
should be fought in a democratic country. 

Again, a democratic family is important because it 
is about the only effective way of thwarting some kind 
of caste system. So long as young people have the 
right to fall in love outside the bonds of caste or con¬ 
vention, no caste system can effectively impose itself 
on a nation. An unfettered Cupid can do more to 
break down caste systems than any other force. The 
democratic family points to a classless society. 

And, finally, the democratic family which is based 
on affection will keep alive in society those values 
which are basic to a worth-while culture. The differ¬ 
ence between Denmark and Germany is essentially this 
difference: the center of Denmark’s regeneration was 
a love story. A young man by the name of Grundtvig, 
disappointed in love, nevertheless came to the con¬ 
clusion that the love of God was his most perfect 
possession and that it was essentially the rule of the 
universe. He came to be the leader of his nation and 
drew his philosophy for a new national life from the 


190 


The Fate of the Family 


idea that roots in the family. It was the extension of 
this philosophy and the social organization of the fam¬ 
ily to touch the furthest outreach of national life that 
gave us present-day Denmark with its splendid social 
organization. Germany, on the other hand, in a later 
but similar crisis, drew her idea from the state and 
from the race and sought to impose them on the fam¬ 
ily. Because of her emphasis upon the state and the 
race she finds difficulty in showing respect to families 
of another race. Only those families have standing in 
Germany which are members of the race. The Jewish 
family happens to be the outstanding object of her hos¬ 
tility at the present time, but the philosophy calls for a 
disregard of all families which are not members of the 
Teutonic race. This attitude looks in the direction of 
a caste system; injury to the family and all the more 
intimate phases of culture seems an inevitable conse¬ 
quence. 

In this country our democratic life, our democratic 
philosophy, should cause us to see every family as 
worthy of respect. The family must not be compelled 
to be members of a certain race in order to be respected. 
Thus we ought to have a perpetual drive against an 
otherwise inevitable caste system. 

So the democratic family has its very real contribu¬ 
tion to make to a national culture. It keeps alive in 
society those values of affection and democratic regard 
for the individual which are deeply rooted in our cul¬ 
ture and which need to be preserved for the future. 
There will, of course, be modifications in the attitude 


Summary 


191 

of the state and race toward the family, but essentially 
the maintenance of this family based on affection seems 
necessary to a good society. The law of the state is 
force; the law of business is trade and profits; the law 
of the family is affection and compassion. The rewards 
of society in the family are placed not at the feet of 
the strong, but at the feet of those who need them most. 
Society would forget this were it not perpetually hav¬ 
ing the family experience. 

The family, it seems to me, has not only a contribu¬ 
tion to make to general and social culture, it also has 
its contribution to make to religion. When we use the 
words, “ Our Father who art in Heaven,” we indicate 
that the basic principle of social organization is a fam¬ 
ily principle — one of generosity, of regard for the 
weakest, of tenderness. These words would become 
formal were we not continuously having the experi¬ 
ence of fatherhood, brotherhood, and the like, within 
family relationships. The family, therefore, to a cer¬ 
tain extent carries on in its intimate relationships that 
which is the heart and core of religion. 

On the other hand, religion also has its contribution 
to make to the family. Down through the years our 
religion has been sympathetic with the family. Its 
great services which organize around family experience 
reflect the fact that religion looks upon family experi¬ 
ence as vital to itself. It teaches men patience, it teaches 
them the obligation to love. It believes that the fam¬ 
ily philosophy of the future, aid and tenderness, is after 
all the basic philosophy of the universe. And there is 


192 


The Fate of the Family 


a perpetual interaction between the great idea of reli¬ 
ance and the great idea of family. If they can join to¬ 
gether in a mutual relationship of support and look out 
upon the rest of society as areas in which these ideas 
need to be projected, we will have a force making for 
the regeneration of all society. 















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